Zoran Mušič (Boccavizza 1909 - Venice 2005) was the interpreter of a unique human and artistic history, whose art is internationally appreciated. Also known as the painter of colts, due to one of his most recurrent subjects in his works, Music was born in a little town near Gorizia, from Slovenian parents. After the studies in Zagreb, he travelled a lot from Paris and Vienna to Prague and Geneva and most importantly to Spain, in Madrid, where he was impressed by the works of Velasquez, El Greco and Goya. The last one is defined by Music as «the one who paved the way to modern painting». Between 1941 and 1942 he exposed his work in Zagreb first and then in Ljubljana, and in 1943 in Venice. But a turning point in his life was about to happen. Under suspicion of being a spy, he was arrested by the Nazis in October 1944, and deported to the concentration camp in Dachau, in Germany. He was imprisoned until his release in 1945, and during that period he made a series of drawings dealing with the tragic life of the internment, the Holocaust and its consequences. About that tragic period Music said: «There is no place for logic here [...] I am like a sleepwalker, a slave, an automaton, accepting this unreal theatre, this total absurdity, as though it were by now inevitable [...] I begin, timidly, to draw. Maybe that is what saves me. Perhaps I have a reason to resist amidst the danger. First I try, hidden in the drawer of my lathe. Things I've seen while walking to the factory: the arrival of a transport, livestock car open, the dead fall out [...] A few survivors gone mad, screaming, eyes bugging out [...] I draw as though in a trance, morbidly grasping these sheets of paper. I was as though I were blinded by the horrific grandiosity of these camps of corpses. Seen from afar, they looked like spots of white, silvery snow on the mountains [...] Drawing, I hung into a thousand details. How much tragic elegance in these fragile bodies [...] Bones covered by white, almost celestial skin. Such zeal so as not to betray these thin forms, to manage to make them as precious as I saw them, reduced to their essence. I was in the grips of a sort of fever, with the irresistible need to draw so that this grandiose, tragic beauty would not escape me». From these sketches, most of them later purchased by the Kunstmuseum in Basel, Music would develop a thematic series executed from the 1970's: Nous ne sommes pas les derniers (We are not the last), confirming the international success of Music's art with major exhibitions at the Haus der Kunst in Munich ant the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Bruxelles (1971), at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1972), with the first show dedicated to a living artist, and at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice (1974). Many works from this series have entered the permanent collections of major international museums, such as The Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C. and the Tate Modern in London. Music's international appreciation started from the beginning of his career, with the series dedicated to Dalmatian landscapes, Sienese landscapes and the Venetian ones, which are recalls to the places he loved turning into emotional landscapes with his colourful and delicate brush strokes. Once free, Music traveled to Ljubljana and Gorizia, moving then to Venice. From 1948 he took part in several editions of the Venice Biennale, winning the Grand Prize for graphic in 1956. As far as recognitions are concerned, we have to mention the Prix de Paris (1951), awarded to Music in Cortina d'Ampezzo on the advice of Massimo Campigli and Gino Severini, jointly with Antonio Corpora. During the 50's he spent several periods in Paris and participated to the Salon de Mai in 1955 where he noticed : «how it is difficult to swim into this universe of abstract painting [...] I was part of a gallery where I was the only one out of line». When he returned to Italy, the Rome Quadriennale dedicated him a solo show (1956), but influenced by the lyric informal abstraction he abandoned the canons of three-dimensionality moving towards organic motifs. His works travelled throughout Europe: from Madrid to Stockholm, and he obtained his first commissions, like the mosaic executed in Ravenna between 1972 and 1973, for the garden of the Hilton Hotel in Munich. Between 1976 and 1980 he started the series of Rocky landscapes, executed between the Fontainebleau forest and the Dolomites, where Music proposed, as always, an emotional geology, where "the feel" is imposed, not "the seen", using the words of Flaminio Gualdoni. In 1979 he took part in the III Biennial in Sydney and in 1981 he was honoured with the title of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres in Paris. During the 80's he turned back to the Venetian views, with the series dedicated to the Giudecca Canal, The Customs House and, from 1984, the Cathedral Interiors. In addition to the Venetian themes there are some new series: portraits on his wife Ida Cadorin - Barbarigo, daughter of his mentor Guido Cadorin, and self-portraits. In 1995, when he was still alive, the Grand Palais in Paris dedicated him a major retrospective with 261 works. In 2009, a century after his birth, the Moderna Galerija of Ljubljana celebrated its re-opening with a big exhibition of more than 140 paintings; and in 2016 the National Gallery of Slovenia inaugurated a permanent retrospective of the artist in one of its display rooms.
Collections - The work of Music is today part of the permanent collections of several international museums, in addition of those listed above: Metropolitan Museum in New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Museo d'arte Moderna in Bologna (MAMBO), Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, Bayerische Staasgemaldesammlungenin Monaco, Museo d'Arte Moderna - Ca' Pesaro in Venezia, Vancouver Art Gallery, Musée de la Ville Moderne in Le Havre, Folkwang Museum in Essen, Moderna Galerja in Zagabria, Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, Nasjonalgalleriet in Oslo, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
His works have been protagonists of solo and group shows, in addition to the ones mentioned before: Kunstmuseum, Basel (1964), Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana (1966), Museo Español de Arte Contemporaneo, Madrid (1972), Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara (1978), Galleria dell'Accademia, Venice (1980), Centre Pompidou, Paris (1988), Palazzo Reale, Milan (1992), Museo Morandi, Bologna (1998).
Galleria d'Arte Maggiore g.a.m. in its historical venue in Bologna organized in 2017 a complete retrospective on the work of Zoran Music. For that occasion, the 40 works selected, dated from 1945 to 1999, permit an in-depth vision on Music's art, through the main series, present in the major museums, and themes loved by the artist, depicting a complete portrait of an artistic research, that is still contemporary today. On that occasion the exhibition catalog was published: Flaminio Gualdoni, Zoran Mušič, Galleria d'Arte Maggiore g.a.m., Silvana Editoriale, 2017.