Zoran Mušič

The Dalmatian Hills painting is dated 1966 and belongs to one of the last series of Mušič’s little horses which he depicted until the late 1960’s, when the motif got worn out. This is a series of canvases with a few elements, such as hills and animals, where the centre is occupied with a hill painted in burnt earth tone, hardly discernible from the background in natural colour of unpainted canvas. Under the hill, there is a herd of horses of different colours, seeming like shadows that change their direction and almost disappear, absorbed in the irradiated horizon. The artist used in this picture the same colour palette as in the depictions of the same time of flowering meadows in the series of Motifs, or Flowers in Cortina.

The Dalmatian Motifs of the 1960's excel by delicate compositions in which the animals turn into wandering shadows. They seem lost, as if they have just appeared from the prehistoric caves, Asian steppes, or children’s dreams. Of ragged rocky Dalmatian and karst hills only a fleeting apparition remains. Everything exists in a light, ethereal landscape, sketched by a few strokes, which prefers the ochre in refined tone harmonies. The painting is one of the earliest Mušič painted with acrylic on the canvas. Namely, after 1966 he gave up painting in oil for several decades, due to his allergy to turpentine.