An Homage to Zoran Music: Venice
Fifty works trace the artist's intense career
The Contini Art Gallery has decided to pay tribute to Anton Zoran Music, ten years after his death, with an exhibition dedicated to the great artist. The exhibition includes around fifty works covering more than half a century of artistic activity, allowing us to partially retrace the artist's complex expressive path.
The exhibition places particular emphasis on the poetic series of works "Little horses passing by" from the early 1950s, which show a remarkable formal and conceptual affinity with the splendid painting "Dalmatian motif" from 1951, an example of truly great evocative painting, perhaps charged with poignant nostalgia for his homeland.
As already noted on several occasions, Music presents himself as an authentic Central European artist, as influences and formal motifs from Austrian Carinthia and Slovenian Styria can be found in his life and works. However, his works also reflect the influence of the two cities he chose as his home for many years: Venice and Paris. The interplay of these different imaginative and emotional influences led the artist, in his maturity, to an intensely reflective oeuvre, characterised by an atmosphere dense with shadows and even darkness.
This characteristic is clearly evident in two extraordinary paintings in the exhibition: the intense 'Self-Portrait' from 1989 and the pensive and dramatic figure of the 'Philosopher' from 1990. These works seem to close a long expressive path dedicated to painting, but here declined in essential and brown tones, representative of the conclusion of a poetic and existential adventure.
