Anna Josipovic-Staub Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1942 -

Anna Josipovic-Staub was born on 11 November 1942 in Banja Luka, in the former Yugoslavia. She lost her father in the war and grew up with her two siblings on her mother’s small farm. In 1968 she came to Switzerland, where she met Erich Staub, whom she married two years later. Between 1969 and 1973 she created some fifty paintings in her own naive style, in which she captured memories of her homeland, village life, and local customs.

Josef John calls these works ‘pictures of homesickness,’ uninfluenced by wellknown examples of Yugoslavian Naive Art of the Hlebine School or by artists such as Ivan Rabuzin. In 1988 John devoted an exhibition to her work and published an accompanying brochure. Later Josipovic- Staub turned to meticulous, often miniature, and yet impersonal decorative Folk Art, which was closely based on traditional painting from Appenzell. She emphatically distanced herself from her early paintings, stating that at the time she didn’t know how to paint. Anna Josipovic-Staub lives and works in St Gall.