Zoran Mušič (1909-2005), an internationally acclaimed modernist painter and printmaker, will be honoured with a series of exhibitions in Slovenia and Italy as Nova Gorica and Gorizia have come together as the first cross-border European Capital of Culture.

Born to Slovenian parents in the Slovenian village of Bukovica in the border area, Mušič spent much of his post-war life between Venice and Paris. He was interned in Dachau in 1944, an experience that he depicted in his 1970s series We Are Not the Last and in his earlier Dachau drawings.

He often sought his motifs in his native region of Kras, painting landscapes, still-lifes, portraits, Dalmatian horses and donkeys, trees, Venice vedutas and distressing old age self-portraits. He is also known for double portraits with his wife, artist Ida Cadorin.

Mušič explored universal themes with a unique artistic expression and his art transcends borders, something that is much in the spirit of the 2025 European Capital of Culture.

The first show will pair Mušič with another painter who was inspired by Kras, Lojze Spacal (1907-2000), opening at the Spacal Gallery at Štanjel Castle on 25 April. Another will open on 14 May at Dobrovo Castle. More than 100 paintings, prints and drawings will be put on display, including the Dachau drawings he made in 1945.

The third major exhibition will open on 25 May in Gorizia at the Attems-Petzenstein Palace, running until 31 October. Curated by Italian Daniela Ferretti, it will feature some 100 works. The Zurich Room, which he decorated in the late 1940s, will be brought from Switzerland and reassembled at the venue for the occasion.

The two exhibitions in Slovenia will run until early September. They are curated by art historian Nelida Nemec, who wrote a doctoral thesis on his work and knew the artist personally. She gave the initiative for the European Capital of Culture to honour the great Slovenian artist, who donated over 130 prints to Nova Gorica at the end of the 1980s.

The two exhibitions will feature works from all of Mušič's periods, but Nemec told the Slovenian Press Agency that she would like gallery visitors to feel what war, suffering and dehumanisation mean as they observe his works. Him being a concentration camp survivor, she believes that Mušič would want that too.

She stressed that he "achieved a wonderful synthesis of two iconographic motifs - landscape and figure - in his works" while he often saw corpses in landscapes, and once said "when I say landscape, I think of corpses, landscapes of corpses".

After the shows in Štanjel and Dobrovo close, half of the donated prints to Nova Gorica will be put on show at Štanjel and the other half at Dobrovo until early January.

Primož Nemec, who is in charge of the Mušič exhibitions in Slovenia, finds it important "that Mušič will be on display throughout the European Capital of Culture. In this way we will give a bigger symbolic meaning to his outstanding oeuvre of prints".

The prints had been on display at Dobrovo Castle before, from 1991 until a few years ago when renovation of the castle began. He expects the entire donation to be again on show at the same location once the European Capital of Culture is over.

A catalogue will be published in Slovenian and Italian for all three exhibitions, those in Štanjel, Dobrovo and Gorizia, expectedly in June.

As an introduction to the Mušič tribute, a digital installation was erected in Nova Gorica on 8 February, the day of the grand opening of the European Capital of Culture, while a similar project is planned for later this year in the artist's birthplace Bukovica.

Mušič's works are part of numerous private and public collections around the globe. In Slovenia, his works can be seen at the permanent exhibition at the National Gallery in Ljubljana, which received a major donation from his relatives more than ten years ago.