Željko Hegedušić (Tuzla, 1906 – Zagreb, 2004) painter, graphic artist and art teacher, exhibited for the first time in 1932 at the exhibition of a left-oriented Grupa Zemlja (Group Earth) founded in 1929 and forbidden in 1936. He formed his visual language in Paris in contact with the then current purism and metaphysical-surrealistic painting. He is considered to be the author of the first completely surreal drawing in Croatia.

His drawings, created in the twenties and the thirties, combine the surreal composition of arbitrary proportions and dreamy levitating characters of expressive characterization with insightful sense of social relationships and the daily drama of their cruelty. Drawings created in mid-thirties are characterized by existentially anxious depictions of militarization of everyday life and visionary allusions of merciless methods of modern warfare.