The exhibition of selected works of Dušan Džamonja produced in the 1950s, to which are added a few years before and a few years after the focal period, is currently being held at the Art Pavilion in Zagreb and will be opened for visitors until May 5th, 2019.
This period of Džamonja’s work was selected particularly to serve as a reminder of a period that is interesting not only as the beginning of the career of a charismatic Croatian artist but also as a moment in which there was a global shift in the forefront of artistic production away from figuration in the direction of abstraction. Fedor Džamonja, the artist’s son and the initiator of this show and the selector of the works, decided to launch the project at the time of a global change of creative paradigm in which – as if we were living in a reversal of the process – the scales are coming down on the side of figuration. This broad-based exhibition includes early-period, figurative sculptures which might come as a surprise to those knowing Džamonja primarily as a master of the bold geometric form.
Dušan Džamonja was a Croatian sculptor born in Macedonia in 1928 and died in Zagreb in 2009. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Art in Zagreb in 1951. In his monumental sculptures he built free sculptural bodies that had clear symbolic messages, in which psychological contrasts were achieved with the use of varied materials. Džamonja did monuments in Slavonski Brod (1951), Mali Lošinj (1955), Zagreb (1960), Podgarić (1967) and on Kozara Mountain in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1973) as well as a monumental ossuary in Barletta, Italy. He won the Vladimir Nazor Lifetime Achievement award in 2007.
