Ivan Rabuzin is a self-taught artist who is renowned as one of the foremost ‘naïve’ painters of all times. He was born in 1921 in the village of Kljuc, near the town of Novi Marof, in Croatia. The Croatian artist worked as a carpenter for many years, and did not begin painting until 1956, when he was thirty-five years old. In 1959 he discovered the theme of lyrical landscapes and with it his own visual language. He painted wreaths of spherical clouds, trees with round trunks, dome-shaped hills, flowers and sun spheres. He found the utmost simplicity, concision and perfection in the sphere and the circle, which were to become his symbols of the absolute, of completeness. Rabuzin stopped painting in 2002 due to an illness. He died on 18 December 2008 in a hospital in Varazdin, Croatia.
More of his work can be viewed here in the Rabuzin Gallery.
Images: Courtesy of various sources.
