Staying at Home with Zbirka UGM / Zoran Mušič - A Street
Staying at Home with Zbirka UGM / Zoran Mušič - A Street
Zoran Mušič (1909–2005), unquestionably one of the most important names in Slovenian painting, was a cosmopolitan who found his home in Venice and often exhibited in Paris. He established himself in the 1970s with the cycles We Are Not the Last, in which he depicted his memories of Dachau in ghastly images of man’s eternal suffering. As a graduate of the Zagreb Academy of Fine Arts Mušič joined Brazda, the Society of Visual Artists in Maribor. In his five active years in this circle he emerged as the most compelling painter in Maribor. Mušič was able to capture the mood and space of the bourgeois atmosphere of Maribor streets and squares with poetic sensibility. The spirited influence of the Parisian Intimists, the contemporary idols of the “Zagreb school”, is particularly noticeable. Mušič painted Maribor's main square, Aleksandrova road (also seen here in our painting), and the railway station again and again. Apart from his exceptional technical skill, the central features at work here are the tonal structure and the gradual transition towards planar composition. The sophisticated harmony of silvers and greys is captured in the raster of broken lines. Through the years of Mušič’s artistic development Maribor's tangible facades were transformed into dreamy Venetian vedutas.
