BRANKO RUŽIĆFamily collection

“Branko Ružić sees everything that he looks at as a sculpture”. That is how the painter Dubravka Babić once described him. Hardworking, full of imagination and curiosity, a man of endless creative energy, Ružić left behind a vast collection of works. A part of that impressive oeuvre is located in museums and galleries around Europe. Most of his works, however, are located at the Gallery Ružić and Contemporaries in Slavonski Brod, as well as in the Ružić Family Collection in Zagreb, the latter of which is cared for by his daughter Rajka Zlatarić and her children Nika and Radovan Zlatarić.

The Ružić Family Collection consists of about six hundred works. It represents all the periods of his creative output, and all the techniques and materials with which Ružić worked as a painter and sculptor. The collection includes everything from pencil and charcoal drawings from his student years, to oil on canvas paintings from the post-war period, to oils and gouaches from his later years. Ružić defined himself as a sculptor only in his late thirties, and ever since sculpture predominated his way of thinking. The collection covers a vast period, from his first sculpture Father (1956), cast in bronze, till his last, unfinished sculpture Alone (1997), which was made in wood.

Especially valuable are his sketches in clay (135 pieces) and plaster (150 pieces); these pieces captured the birth of an idea for a future project. Clay was particularly handy for these spontaneous constructions, as wood and chisel, stone and hammer, an oven for terracotta, and papier-mâché were not always at Ružić’s immediate disposal. One could say that the Ružić Family Collection offers a secret glance into the artist’s atelier, which precious few have seen.

Rajka Zlatarić, the daughter of Branko Ružić, is the owner of the Ružić Family Collection, and the copyright owner of all of Ružić’s artworks. She can be contacted at:

E-mail: rzlataric@yahoo.com
Mobile phone: +385 95 397 26 72
Home phone: +385 1 4680 665