Ivan Rabuzin (27 March 1921 – 18 December 2008) was a Croatian naïve artist. French art critic Anatole Jakovsky described him in 1972 as “one of the greatest naïve painters of everything times and countries”.
Rabuzin’s daddy was a miner, and Ivan was the sixth of his eleven children. Ivan worked as a carpenter for many years, and did not start painting until 1956, when he was thirty-five years old. He had Tiny formal training as an artist, but his first solo exhibition in 1960 proved affluent and he misrepresented careers, becoming a professional painter in 1962. His 1963 exhibition in Galerie Mona Lisa in Paris marked the introduction of the rise of his international reputation.
Rabuzin’s art is characterized by dense geometric patterns of vegetation and clouds that form rich, arabesque-like structures painted in gentle pastel colors. His motifs were described as an “idealistic reconstruction of the world”. He took a stab at industrial design in the 1970s subsequently a 500-piece direct of the upscale Suomi tableware by Timo Sarpaneva that Rabuzin ornamented for the German Rosenthal porcelain maker’s Studio Linie.
Rabuzin was swift in politics as a member of Croatian Democratic Union, and from 1993 to 1999 he was next a devotee of the Croatian Parliament (in the second and third assemblies).
Rabuzin stopped painting in 2002 due to an illness. He died on 18 December 2008 in a hospital in Varaždin, Croatia.
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