bronze, 50 x 24 x 14 cm

Research information

The artwork was exhibited and reproduced in the exhibition catalog Dušan Džamonja: The Fifties and Sixties, Art Pavilion in Zagreb, 2019, cat. no. 1. Two casts of the piece are known to exist, produced by sand casting during Džamonja's studies in the class of Antun Augustinčić. The artwork is accompanied by the expert opinion of academic Željka Čorak. The artwork is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from the Šeb Foundry.

Dušan Džamonja is a renowned sculptor of our high modernism. He was born in Strumica, Macedonia, in 1928 and died in Zagreb in 2009. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1951, and was also a collaborator in the master workshops of Antun Augustinčić and Frano Kršinić. Even though Džamonja is known for his robust sculptures of coarse texture and abstract monumentality, this figurative, early work of his, dated 1949, represents the beginnings of his creativity. In those years, immediately after the Second World War, motifs from peasant life were not rare in art, since the official, socialist policy based its ideological presentation on the empowerment of disenfranchised classes in civil society – primarily the working class, and then also the peasantry. Genre scenes from rural life, like this sculpture of a woman carrying water from a well, are actually connecting to the very popular peasant realism in Croatia, which appeared primarily in literature, and then also in art, at the end of the 19th century, and continued during the first half of the 20th century, through a simple and often idyllic portrayal of rural life. In 1949, despite the recent political breakup of the alliance between Yugoslavia and the USSR, Socialist realism was still the main stream of artistic expression in our country - with the dictate of the mentioned class emancipation in the theme and recognisability of motifs in form. All these traces of time and its poetics can be seen in this sculpture. Nevertheless, it carries within itself something characteristic of the work of its author, then still young Dušan Džamonja. These characteristics can be seen in the massiveness of the forms with which he builds the body, in the abstracting of the description and the reduction of the figure almost to the basic relations of dynamic counterpose (especially in the position of the arms), and in the pronounced texturing of its drapery. All in all, this is a very interesting piece in which we can see the lesser-known, but developmentally important, part of the oeuvre of this remarkable Croatian abstract sculptor. FG

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