Ivan Rabuzin

Who was Ivan Rabuzin?

Ivan Rabuzin was a Croatian naïve artist.

Rabuzin's father was a miner, and Ivan was the sixth of his eleven children. Ivan worked as a carpenter for many years, and did not begin painting until 1956, when he was thirty-five years old. He had little formal training as an artist, but his first exhibition of paintings proved successful and he changed careers, becoming a professional painter in 1962.

Rabuzin's paintings included Avenue and My Homeland. He was active in politics as a member of Croatian Democratic Union, and from 1993 to 1999 he was also a member of the Croatian Parliament. He took a stab at industrial design in the 1970s with a 500-piece run of the upscale Suomi tableware by Timo Sarpaneva that Rabuzin decorated for the German Rosenthal porcelain maker's Studio Linie.

Rabuzin died 18 December 2008 in a hospital in Zagreb, Croatia.