Branko Ružić
Lorca II, 1989
gouache on paper
MG- 6427

Branko Ružić has spent a long time searching for his artistic path. During his high school days, he showed outstanding talent, and together with his friend Slavko Kopač, he spent time drawing and painting in the Vinkovac area. After high school, he first enrolled to study engineering, which he left to study architecture. He then abandoned architecture in favour of art history, and then history of literature. Eventually, in 1944, he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, where he obtained a degree in painting, but he will devote his artistic work to sculpture. He was inspired by prehistoric and folk art, children’s drawings, Stonehenge and wooden architecture of the Posavina region. All these sources can be recognised in his sculpture, which gives the impression of rudimentariness and incompleteness.

The drawing “Lorca II” displays some of these characteristics: it is dominated by large summarily indicated surfaces, which shape the human figure. In an attempt to depict the execution of the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, Ružić used the texture of the paper. The drawing is not executed on blank paper, but the page of a daily newspaper, which gives the scene not only a visual, but also semantic value. Ružić treats the surfaces covered with black and white pigment as another layer of specific texture. And finally, as in the sculptures, the representation of the human figure is extremely simplified: the body is a sign, and not a realistic representation. Despite this, it is possible to recognise the poet’s collapsed body.

Text: Klaudio Štefančić curator at the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art , Zagreb, 2023
Translated by: Robertina Tomić
Photo: Goran Vranić National Museum of Modern Art , Zagreb, 2023