The exhibition offers over one hundred and thirty works comprising oils, temperas, drawings in pencil, sketches and preparatory studies, large canvases and small paintings. Some of these works have never been on public display before and, completed by the Bosnian artist during the last ten years of his activity, represent a dramatic, extraordinary protagonist of figurativeness today.

Endowed with exceptional, precocious talent, Zec goes back to classical ancestors: Tintoretto, Palma the Younger, Caravaggio and Freud; he shows not only the linguistic confidence of his ancient teachers but also the eager studies of a solitary researcher combined with a craze for experimentation. Whether finished or unfinished, the quantity and quality of his work is surprising, but its transparency is crystal clear, the control complete, and it is all totally lucid and rational. Furthermore, Safet Zec is, perhaps, the most important representative of reflection on the tragedy of a people and the endless possibilities of painting that can participate in both their suffering, and provide poetical interpretations of an everyday life.

The exhibition is arranged in highly evocative thematic sequences that wind along the nine rooms on the second floor of the Correr Museum. The first great piece, Facciata veneziana [Venetian Façade] (tempera and acrylic on paper, cm 120x350) is witness to the ties and sense of belonging the artist had with the city that welcomed him when the war in former Yugoslavia forced him to flee Sarajevo in 1992. This is followed by the images, atmosphere and tools of his Venetian atelier, his space and world, both refuge and origin of an artistic existence and activity that are reborn and renewed. Of heartbreaking authenticity, the views of a “minor” Venice are followed by still lives, what Zec called “silent lives”, boats and doors, forgotten objects, baskets, brushes, colours, rope, bread boards and mirrors. And shapes of bread that are of sacred beauty