Paintings and works on paper by Zoran Music in Ljubljana
October 25 – November 9 2019
Antikvitete Novak galerija
On display are landscapes of Dalmatia, Tuscany and Umbria, as well as portraits and genre scenes of peasants and fishermen, and cityscapes from Paris and Venice. Also on view are paintings from his Cavallini series, in which depictions of horses became a symbol of freedom and humanity, and works from his “We Are Not the Last” series, created in the 1970s.
On the occasion of this exhibition, Gallery MAGNET will present an extensive book documentation about Zoran Music with texts by Peter Handke, collector and music expert, Siegbert Metelko, and art curators Ivan Ristic and Natasa Ivanovic.
………………..Like few other artists, Music unites through his life and art the qualities of the Adriatic Alpine region, whose fate today moves all hearts. Born in Gorizia before the First World War, he grew up in the Trieste area, moved to Styria and Carinthia at a young age, then trained at the Academy in Zagreb, from where he visited Vienna and Prague, and finally recognized in Venice for his artistic potential, he is a child of our region. The motifs of the artistic territory of Veneto and Dalmatia and the aesthetics of the Byzantine tradition of these eastern territories formed the basis of his art. From there his interest extended to Madrid and finally to Paris, which, along with Venice, he chose as his main residence after the Second World War. From a Central European he became a European and developed his strongest powers in the polarity of Western and Eastern Europe.
In the middle of his life he was also drawn into the horror of our European destiny. In 1944 he was captured by the SS and deported to Dachau as an alleged collaborator of the resistance. He experienced the beauty and the horror of our time and connected it with the depths of our past, the peasant traditions of Dalmatia and the splendor and elegance of the old Venice and the cosiness of the old Austrian region. From this, Music’s art draws its peculiarity and can help us to recognize, in our time of turmoil and fragmentation, what should deeply hold together this southeastern part of ancient Central Europe, a deep, humane culture and sensibility that unites man and nature. ……….
Siegbert Metelko ( from the catalog ALBERTINA 1992/93)
Translated excerpt from an article in the largest Slovenian newspaper “delo” about this exhibition:
“Mušič and Peter Handke
The Magnet Gallery has accompanied the exhibition with a comprehensive four-language catalog, “Zoran Mušič – Fascination of Painting”, edited by Wilfried Magnet and Siegbert Metelko, who was a friend and close companion of the artist for more than two decades. The text for the catalog with more than 150 illustrations was written by Siegbert Metelko, Peter Handke, Ivan Ristić and Nataša Ivanović. The Mušič family spent a year in Handke’s birthplace, Griffen, until they were expelled by the Austrian nationalists after the 1920 referendum. Peter Handke and Mušič met in Venice: “One day I was in the artist’s studio, in the Zattere district in Venice, opposite the bar in front of which I often sat, many years ago, on the evenings after working on my film script Wrong move… So I close my eyes once again and listen to Zoran Music tell how his father, who was Slovenian, shortly after the First World War and the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, became a teacher in the small Carinthian town, close to the Yugoslavian border, where I was born twenty years later.”
Philosopher and man
Metelko, otherwise a collector and music expert, offers isolated glimpses into the artist’s biography, describing how Mušič was arrested by the Gestapo in Venice in 1944, from where they deported him first to the Rižarna concentration camp in Trieste and then to Dachau. He also recalls Mušič’s friendship withFrançoisMitterrand, both of whom shared a similar outlook on history, politics, and art (the French president honored him by making him a Knight of the Legion of Honor). “