The Croatian painter Marijan Jevšovar graduated from the Academy of Commerce in Zagreb in 1941, and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in the class of Marino Tartaglia in 1946. From 1946 to 1948, he attended his special course. In search of his own artistic expression, in his early works he explores the problem of space in classical subject genres, landscapes, still life and figural compositions - in a series of self-portraits and scenes from the studio. Then, aware that the content and value of the painting do not depend on the motif, presentation or theme, he searches for a way out of descriptive, literary and aesthetic "limitations". At the end of the 1950s, under the influence of the paintings of Junek and Tartaglia and his frequent stays in Paris (Canal St. Martin, 1954), he stopped painting according to the object, became preoccupied with abstract contents and finally rejected painting the illusion of space and form.

In 1959–66 he participated in the activities of Gorgona, a group that, in the process of seeking intellectual, spiritual and artistic freedom, anticipated various forms of artistic activity and behavior (conversations and selections of "thoughts for individual months", trips to nature, correspondence freed from messages, etc.). He is preoccupied with the problems of "how to turn spiritual and mental knowledge into matter and what is an artistic act and a work of art", so his painting takes on extremely contemplative features. Representing the principles of the radical informal movement and implementing the program of anti-painting (negation of form and composition, use of a register of neutral colors from black to white, erasing and repainting the surface), he creates the anthological painting Gray Surface (1960–62, MSU in Zagreb), freed from any semantic meaning and aesthetic principles and reaches "nothing-art, the zero point of Croatian abstract painting" (I. Zidić). At the end of the 1960s, he expanded the color register, approaching monochrome and analytical painting and "colored field" painting, but each of these positions sharpened to the limit and retained the characteristic hermeticity of his works. He solves the problem of the default format of the canvas by working on large surfaces from which he cuts out an "area of ​​interest", paints a frame or circles parts of the picture that he believes have "a charge that transforms matter into art". In the 1990s, he reduced the smears of paint and reaffirmed the shape. The search for "charge" and long-term work on the works reflected in the small number of his oeuvre.