Bojan Šumonja

Bojan Šumonja   / Biography

Bojan Šumonja was born in Pula, Croatia, in 1960. He graduated from the High School of Art in Pula and graduated from the Accademia die Belle Arte di Venezia, department of sculpture. He is one of the founders of the Croatian Association of Fine Artists if Istria, a member of the Art Organization ROBOT, Pula, and he is an artistic director of the Poola Gallery in Pula. He has represented Croatia at numerous international projects and has had about 100 solo exhibitions. His works are in the permanent exhibition of the Zagreb Modern Gallery, in the permanent collection of the Rijeka Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rovinj Heritage Museum, Piran Coastal Galleries, and in numerous regional, city and private collections. Šumonja is considered one of the most famous and recognized Croatian visual artists of the last decades. He has exhibited independently over 100 times across Europe and in the USA. His works have, among others, been presented at independent exhibitions in Venice, Milan, Berlin, Hamburg, Vienna, Klagenfurt, Graz, Brussels, Ljubljana, Luxembourg, New Orleans, Zagreb, Dubrovnik and throughout Croatia. In his richly baroque compositions, sheep, gaunt flamingos, birds, downtrodden refugees and superheroes often appear, like the “generals after the battle,” in absurd and dangerous scenarios of ecological, social and political catastrophes or dystopian landscapes. His works are full of complex ironic references for which the artist was celebrated as the first “postmodernist” on the Croatian scene.