Zoran Music (1909 - 2005)

Zoran Music

Zoran Anton Mušič is a Slovenian painter and graphic artist who has worked in Italy and France.

Zoran studied painting in Maribor and Zagreb, then went to Madrid and Toledo for a year, where he studied and copied works by Goya and El Greco. At the end of 1944, he became a prisoner of the Nazi concentration camp Dachau, where he spent several months. He survived and even made about two hundred drawings on paper in the camp. After his liberation, Mušić moved to Venice and later to Paris.

Zoran Mušić was the only artist of Slovenian origin who managed to establish himself in the elite cultural circles of Italy and France, especially in Paris in the second half of the 20th century, where he lived most of his later life. He painted landscapes, still lifes, portraits and self-portraits, as well as horror scenes from the Dachau concentration camp and Vedute Venice. In 1970-1971, the artist created a pictorial reminiscence cycle "We are not the last", dedicated to concentration camp prisoners and became the most famous of his works.

The figures in Mušić's paintings appear out of empty space and seem unfinished. The colors of his self-portraits are the harsh colors of the desert, eliminating the superfluous and reducing to a minimum. These paintings are evidence of the artist's search for answers to the basic questions of human existence.