Zoran Mušič is probably the most renowned Slovenian modernist artist. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, and was then profoundly marked by his internment in the Dachau concentration camp, where he was taken to from Venice in 1944. After the war, he returned to the new, socialist Yugoslavia, but soon left the country to move first to Venice and then to Paris, where he became associated with the School of Paris. In the early postwar years, Mušič focused mainly on images of horses and landscapes in his work. Influenced by Paris and existentialist philosophy, he produced works that began to verge on abstraction, in particular landscapes, such as A Simple Fence.

In the early 1970s, two and a half decades after the war, Mušič stunned the public with a series of oil paintings and prints entitled We are not the Last, depicting piles of emaciated corpses of concentration camp internees, with the emphasis mainly on the expressive faces, genitals, and hands. The applications of paint in predominantly earth tones blend in with the natural color of the unprimed canvas, creating an effect of unfinishedness, or perhaps of an illusion – images that appear before us as haunting, horrific memories.

An analogy can be drawn between this series and Mušič’s landscapes (e.g., Rocky Landscape). There, the rocks and boulders gradually turn into heads, while the bare (karstic) ground transforms into piles of dead bodies. The first-person plural used in the title of the series is a chilling and eerie reminder or warning of the possible delusion in the hope nurtured by the former internees that Dachau was the final, extreme point in the history of human insanity, horror, and violence. Mušič’s paintings were powerfully relevant when they first appeared, and their meaning remains just as urgent and resonant today.