Ladislav Kralj

After his recovery at the hospital in Miskolec, he returned to Čakovec, where he met Ivan Novak, a literary writer and active local politician who helped him continue with his studies.

During the late 1920s and early 1930s, he created two more collections of etchings, “Dalmacija” (1926–1928) and “Varaždin” (1929–1932), and painted canvases depicting social themes (“Radnici na pruzi”, 1927, “Međimurka”, 1933), whose quality kept pace with the works of contemporary Croatian artists of critical realism.

[2] During the Second World War, Kralj-Međimurec lived solitarily in a small village of Krkanec near Varaždin, where he devoted most of his time to painting landscapes, which remained his most dominant theme until his death in 1976.

During the early 1940s, he worked with dark tones of brown, green, and yellow, applying them onto the canvas using wide strokes (“Zagorsko dvorište”, “Stari škedenj”).

During the so-called Šenkovec phase (1946–1956), he began to paint his landscapes using short strokes of impasto – often applying it directly with a painting-knife – which gave his canvases a granulated effect (“Seosko dvorište”, 1954).