Flowering

Branka Brmbota (artist name of Branislava Radakovich, Croatia, 1939) received her education at the School for Applied Arts in Zagreb and her first exhibition in that city was in 1962. After that she made several journeys, among others to Paris, to develop herself further as an artist. Branka shows us a completely own world, being the result of contemplation. Fled for the war in former Yugoslavia she ended up in Amsterdam in 2000, together with her daughter Angelina Bratusa, who saw it as her task to promote her mother’s work. On Branka’s first solo exhibition in Amsterdam in 2005 she showed among other things a complete and impressive Zodiac series, the fruit of 2 years of work in difficult circumstances, which is now part of the Aurora Art Collection.

In 1998 Prof. Josip Depolo from Zagreb wrote an introduction to the work of Branka Brmbota, entitled ‘Branka’s Mystical Mythology’ from which below some fragments.

‘Branka is attentively listening to her ‘Inner voices’, which are obviously not in agreement with the so called ‘historical moment’; she paints in a firm belief that her disturbing Boschian visions represent the steps leading to the very center of our dramatic, closing century.(…) She has kept intact her childish belief in a world without dividing line between possible and impossible. To a superficial observer, who has to – due to his lack of creative fantasy – label all ideas in accordance with already existing patterns, who in other words feels disorientated in an unpredictable world, full of mystery and surprises, the mystical component of Branka’s work might seem outdated and in an open conflict with the ‘rationalism’ of the actual moment, the actuality of which might not necessarily be the actuality of the historical moment.(…) The way I see Branka’s world, it is an almost literal (re(interpretation of the first chapter of the Book of Genesis. It represents that decisive and secret moment in which the Divine Spirit is hovering over all our darknesses, over our uncertain human fate. It represents that mystical moment of the birth of poetry and of our lyrical exaltation with the world around us.’

The delicate ink drawing ‘Flowering’ shows a romantic couple amidst butterfly women and floral motifs.It is signed in the right below. The Art-Deco frame is worn but authentic.