Nous ne sommes pas les derniers (We Are Not the Last)

In 1944 Zoran Music was arrested by the Gestapo in Venice and deported to the concentration campo in Dachau, an experience that marked his life and his art thereafter. In 1945 he made a series of drawings depicting scenes related to the Holocaust: cremation ovens, hanged men and piles of corpses. These drawings would be the inspiration, in the 1970s, for the series Nous ne sommes pas les derniers (We Are Not the Last), to which this work belongs. This group of paintings is a break from his other work in that decade; while he often used a language bordering on abstraction and with remnants of informalism and tachisme, in Nous ne sommes pas les derniers he returned to a figuration of very personal characters, close to Expressionism, which would come to identify the central period of his production. He opts for a flat painting without perspective or volume, which situates these characters – archetypes of the innocent victim – in an indeterminate space that allows them to be associated with any genocide in history.