Dušan Džamonja

Biografia

Dušan Džamonja was born in 1928 in Strumica in Macedonia of Herzegovinian parents.

In 1945 he enrols at the Academy of Fine Art in Zagreb where he is a pupil of important Yugoslavian artists: Vanja Radauš, Franco Kršinić and Antun Augustinčić. At the beginning of the 1950s he starts to specialise in sculpture. The materials he prefers are iron, wood, corten steel, glass, aluminum, concrete and bronze. In 1953 he opens his own studio and by the following year is already present at the Venice Biennale. From then he starts a long career of exhibitions at home and abroad in particular in Italy and in Germany. In 1960 he returns to the Venice Biennale with his own room and wins the prize for sculpture.

During those years he wins many commissions in Yugoslavia organised by the government to create monumental and comemorative works dedicated to the victims and the battles of the Second World War. Some of the country’s most significant monuments carry his signature: the most famous include the 10m tall monument in Podgaric (Croatia) dedicated to the revolution and those on the Mrakovica and Kozara mountains (Bosnia and Herzegovina), the monumental complex in Sid in Serbia, the great walls of chains and wood in the museum in Jasenovac and the memorial dedicated to the victims of the war in Croatia in the 1990s. He works on important comemorative pieces abroad too: in Dachau, the only monument dedicated to the victims of the concentration camps and in Barletta in Italy, the ossuary for the Yugoslavians who fell during both World Wars.

From 1970 he works in Vrsar, in Istria. He dedicates himself to important architectural structures for museums, galleries, mosques and skyscrapers. His works include the Fiume Islamic Centre in Croatia, considered by many to be the most beautiful mosque in Europe.

In 1987 he moves to Brussels and divides his time between the Belgian capital, Vrsar and Zagreb. Soon after he becomes a special member <honorary member? > of the Academy of Art and Science in Belgrade (SANU) and in 2004 of Zagreb (HAZU).  His last monument is in Zagreb at the Mirogij Cemetery and is dedicated to the victims of the war of the 1990s.

During the course of his artistic career Džamonja has taken part in over 120 exhibitions either as a solo artist or as part of a collective. He has won 24 prizes and international awards from the Venice Biennale to the Rembrandt Award from the Goethe Foundation in Basel. His works are found in 46 museums throughout the world, from Moma in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the Peggy Guggenheim Foundation in Venice. His sculptures have been displayed in front of the Palace of Justice in Brussels, in Place Vendôme in Paris, Praca de Commercio in Lisbon, and Regent’s Park in London. In Vrsar in Croatia, the park next to his home and studio has been transformed into an open-air museum dedicated to him, where it is possible to admire a number of his large scale works. He dies in Zagreb in 2009.