Franović Toni – Portrait of a Friend

Toni Franović was born in Zagreb on April 15, 1967. He has been drawing and painting since early childhood and has been exhibiting since 1989. After three years of studying medicine at the University of Zagreb, he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts where he graduated in 1990. In 1993, he was employed at the “Arad Arts Project” in Arad, where he taught painting. During the 1994/95 academic year, he stayed at the “American University, Wesley Theological Seminary” in Washington D.C., where he taught the spirituality of art. At the end of 1995, he was employed as a junior assistant at the painting and drawing department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, where he taught figure drawing and plein air painting until 2004. He has been a guest lecturer at the “Kresage Academic Center” in Washington D.C., “School of Visual Arts” in New York, and others. His significant artistic interventions on public buildings include the central building of Nama in Zagreb, the interior of the Jewish Community building in Zagreb, Or Kodesh Jewish Center in Chevy Chase, Maryland, Oxnam Church in Washington D.C., WUJS Institute in Arad, Israel, and more. His paintings and works are in numerous private and public collections, as well as in the holdings of several museums in Europe, America, and Israel. He has held more than one hundred solo exhibitions. He is a member of HDLU, Zuh Beit Omanim (the visual artists’ community in Israel). He currently lives in Zagreb.