31.01.1928–14.01.2009
Dušan Džamonja
Dušan Džamonja (1928–2009) was born in Strumica, studied at the Zagreb Academy and from 1953 worked in his own studio. He created memorials at Podgarić, on Mrakovica and in Barletta, Italy, and in Istria built a house with a studio and a sculpture park to his own design. He worked in bronze, iron, concrete, glass and Corten steel.
Biography
Džamonja began building his house and studio in Vrsar, in Istria, in 1970, to his own design. A sculpture park grew up beside it and is now counted among the local attractions.
He was born on 31 January 1928 in Strumica, then in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. His origins are described in different ways, as Macedonian or Serbian; he himself was a Yugoslav and later a Croatian sculptor.
In 1945 Džamonja entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, where his teachers were Vanja Radauš, Frano Kršinić and Antun Augustinčić. He graduated in 1951 in Augustinčić’s master class. For two more years, until 1953, he worked in Kršinić’s workshop, and then opened his own in Zagreb. His first solo exhibition was held in 1954 at the ULUH Salon in Zagreb. His early years were spent in competitions for monuments: in 1958 he won prizes for a design for a memorial at Jajinci, near Belgrade, and in 1959 he was one of six prizewinners in the international competition for a monument to the victims of Dachau. In 1960 he took part in the Venice Biennale, where, by some accounts, he was nominated for the main prize, and this drew the attention of international critics. In the same year he received the City of Zagreb Award. His best-known works are connected with the memory of the Second World War. The Monument to the Revolution at Podgarić, in the Moslavina region, dates from 1967. The memorial ossuary for Yugoslav soldiers who died in the two world wars, at Barletta in southern Italy, won first prize in 1968 and was completed in 1970. The Monument to the Revolution on Mrakovica, in Kozara National Park in Bosnia and Herzegovina, won its competition in 1970 and was finished in 1972. Some projects stayed on paper, for example a memorial at Podhum near Rijeka and an ossuary in Rome.
His materials changed from work to work: bronze and iron, wood, glass, concrete, polyester, and later Corten steel and aluminium. He is also known for a technique that joins nails with charred wood, and for cycles of sculptures of animals. He drew a great deal in chalk and in washed ink, and at the Biennale of Original Drawing in Rijeka in 1986 he received the jury’s prize. I think these sheets are worth looking at alongside the sculpture: the tense contour appears in them before the volume does.
Large abstract pieces by Džamonja have been shown in the Place Vendôme in Paris, in Lisbon, in front of the Palace of Justice in Brussels and in Regent’s Park in London. He exhibited in Zagreb, Belgrade, Milan, Venice, Zurich, Rome, London, Kassel and other cities, and took part in Expo 58 and in the biennials of São Paulo and San Marino. In 1977 he received the Rembrandt Prize of the Goethe Foundation in Basel. From 1987 he had a further studio, in Brussels, and he lived in turn in Zagreb, Vrsar and Brussels. From 1988 he was a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and on 20 May 2004 he became a full member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. In 2000 he received the Masaryk Academy Prize in Prague, and in 2007 the Vladimir Nazor Award for lifetime achievement.
Dušan Džamonja died in Zagreb on 14 January 2009.
Profile notes