I began to draw pictures when I was one years old. My father placed a giant piece of white paper on the floor before me. I could not yet walk. Eventually he had to take the crayons away because I started to eat them.

My paintings are visual journals constructed from day to day experiences. Each one acts as its own storyboard of events. Communication plays a major role in my work. Repeated marks, gesture and shapes bounce from one canvas to the other, erupting rigorous dialogue. There is a sense of urgency, immediacy, conflict and chaos. In other works, the response seems simple, concrete and playful.

My intention is to paint pictures with a voice. So that they may convey, confront, question and answer the viewer with honesty.

 

Leila Mehulić, Curator, Mimara Museum, Zagreb

In 1967, writing about the artist’s role in society, Herbert Read noted: “Our basic psychological activity is to merge, to search the balance between spirit, psyche and the external world”.

It appears that in this statement Read provided an answer to the question of what differentiates the artist from the non-artist, that is to say, the difference between the creator, who is in touch with himself and the world around him; and one who is alienated from himself and his surroundings.

As a stylization of existence, art dictates to its adherent, to live, first and foremost, a life of consciousness and freedom. It seems paradoxical that it is especially difficult for a young artist to attain this freedom. Often, even the strongest artist has difficulty overcoming a lack of confidence in his own uniqueness and has to travel a long road to establish his style.

For that reason, to have a young person successfully reach such a level of emancipated expression is a true sensation.  I believe that 25 year old Mirana Zuger is precisely such an artist, but she is still largely unknown to our audience.  Being part of the North American continent has also significantly defined the morphological qualities of Zuger’s painting, which has emerged from the lyrical abstract tradition.

Mirana Zuger established a closer tie to Abstract painting through her professor and mentor Françoise Sullivan, a renowned member of the momentous Montréal group of artists known as “Les Automatistes” founded in the 1940s. Alongside her likeminded colleagues Paul-Ëmile Borduas, Jean-Paul Riopelle and Fernand Leduc, Sullivan was a pioneer of a movement that can best be described with Hans Hartung’s words: as the act “born of an inner necessity”.

The starting point of this radical movement was the idea that an individual has a moral obligation to live “authentically”, that is, to be free. The paintings of Mirana Zuger reflect the same belief.

It should be stressed that the “authenticity” and the aforementioned “emancipated” expression of this young artist rises above the conventional understanding of these concepts. Her biomorphic shapes are akin to that of Wols; her witty forms are suggestive of Miró; her impasto has a Rothko-type diaphanous quality with soft edges; her colour dynamics evoke Kandinsky’s art; and the fluctuation between abstract and figurative is on the same path as Helen Frankenthaler or Nicholas de Stael, while her primitive pictograms remind us of Bazoties… Nonetheless, such “post-modern mannerism” reveals the exceptional theoretical knowledge and skill used to transform known matrixes, which are the qualities we associate with rare master painters that are not seen very often. Her overwhelming heterogeneous style is coupled with a thoughtfully honed métier and inexhaustible productivity.

I would say that painting comes to Mirana Zuger as naturally as breathing. Her statement that “I was painting so much that I could not tell what time of year it was”, may seem insignificant at first glance, but it reveals more than anything said above.  It points to Zuger’s shamanistic nature as an artist which enables her to bring the mystery of the world closer to the “alienated” among us.