If You Are an Artist Then Why Don't You Live Off Your Art? (Gastarbeiter Series)

The versatile self-taught artist Drago Trumbetaš (Velika Mlaka near Zagreb, 1937), a typesetter by vocation, is in his art work spontaneously aligned with the tradition of the best socially engaged figurative artists like Otto Dix and Georg Grosz as well as the pieces produced by the Zemlja group. Temporarily employed in Germany, he worked at arduous tasks, but at the same time created a fine oeuvre of artworks about the gastarbeiter, in which, as chronicler and critic, he recorded in his drawing both his own life and those of many other exiled breadwinners who shared his fate.
Deliberately addressing the society of plenty in which he was a guest, he created the cycle Frankfurt ist Krankfurt, in which, moralising from his own angle as man of rural origins, he denounced the decadence of the developed West.
Trumbetaš has created an imaginary conversation with Van Gogh, in a cycle in which he practices a rather particular conceptual procedure. Recognising in the great personality of the unhappy painter many points of contact from his own biography, the author exchanges ideas and experiences with Van Gogh, draws in his way, copying and making pastiches of his paintings. In this cycle the master of the black and white drawing, true to the painting of his imaginary interlocutor, began an intensive use of colour.