Biography
Andrea Musa (Croatian, born 1979 in Frankfurt am Main/Germany) obtained a B.A. in painting at the Assenza Academy in Basel/Switzerland (2002), and went on to obtain her M.A. from the University of Laws in Split in 2007. She has receives several awards and recognitions, including the First Prize for Painting by the International Olympic Committee (“Olympic Sports and Art” – in the frame of the Athens 2004 Olympic Games). While doing various solo and groups shows, she represented Croatia at the International Biennial of Contemporary Art in Florence/Italy(2003), and at the United Nations in New York/USA(2006).
She is a member of the Croatian Association of Visual Artists and Croatian Freelance Artists’ Association. Since 1998 she staged numerous solo and group exhibitions, workshops and seminaries in and outside Europe, and was an Artist-in-Residence at the Centre International des Récollets and the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris/France. Lives and works in Split/Croatia.
Musa’s paintings flows from the thin line to be found between light and darkness, dusk and dawn, and her work is strongly inspired by these two moments of each day. She had to flee from the house of her childhood following the war in Former Yugoslavia in 1991, and this uprooting from the city of Mostar brought her to an early realization of the capricious nature of fate. This sudden passage from idealism to pragmatism, the collapse of what seemed absolute, and the exile that followed surely have played their role in her development. Soon she started to read and drew influences from people such as Goethe, T.Ujevic, J.Kerouac, B.Hamvas, Sartre or Tagore.
Nature nevertheless remain her main refuge and the strong connection she entertains with mountains and forests, her paramount inspiration. It is trying to understand her bound with the “abnormal beauty” of nature that she discovered the theory of the unconscious in the psychoanalytic works of Jung. Books like Symbols of Transformation, where the psychiatrist tries to create a wider setting for all those psychic contents which could find no room, no breathing space, in the constricting atmosphere of Freudian psychology, further inspired her and paved the way for her actual work, which substance oscillate between the crepuscular and the gloaming of nightfall.