Ivan Rabuzin

Opening the sky

1986

Ivan Rabuzin was a Croatian naive painter and one of the most eminent lyric painters of the 20th century in Croatia. For many years he worked as a carpenter, until he began painting in his 35th year. He had a characteristic pastel palette with mild, pleasing, bright colors, which made his artwork quiet and peaceful. There are always nature and rural motives especially from Croatian Zagorje and we can usually see landscapes with hills, puffy clouds and sun, oversized colorful flowers, small villages, forests, fields etc. Rabuzin’s artwork is characterized by perfect organisation of space, and stylisation of forms and gentle gradation of nuances and most important – circles. For him a circle is a basic form in nature, which he transformed into a hill, a flower, a cloud, a tree crown and the sun. He usually made gradation or whole forms with points or circles arranged in strict rhythmic strings. Perspectives and proportions are adapted to the meaning represented in the painter’s consciousness. Oversized flowers, characteristic for his artwork, are a symbol of life, infinity, birth and youth, and universal harmony and paradise.