Vrlić Antun – Untitled 2

About the author:

He was born in 1957 in Split, where he began his artistic journey that would lead him to the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. He graduated in 1982 in the class of the distinguished professor Raoul Goldoni, thus starting an impressive career that has spanned four decades.

He held his first solo exhibition in 1982 at the Bogdan Ogrizović Library in Zagreb, marking the beginning of a series of thirty solo presentations. At the same time, he participated in sixty group exhibitions both in Croatia and on the international scene. His graphic opus includes three printed graphic portfolios, while in public spaces he carried out significant intervention works such as the mosaic “Traces of the Alka” (1988), the ambient performance “Bethlehem – Good News” in the Church of Our Lady of Sinj (1983), and the floor mosaic in the Adam Gallery in Sinj (1989).

As a member of the Croatian Association of Fine Artists (HDLU) and the Zagreb Artists’ Association (ZUH), with the status of an independent artist, Vrlić has received numerous awards for his painting, characterized by a unique visual language. Critic Vladimir Maleković emphasized in the 1995 exhibition catalog: “Anton Vrlić wishes to testify to his time in his own way. His paintings of the dramas of our spaces are a sensitized drama of the painting itself; fissures in the mountains and ugly banners as rags hanging on them are ominous heralds of the atrophy of objects and the abyss of nothingness.”

Even today, living and creating in Zagreb, Anton Vrlić remains faithful to his artistic approach, which through the painting medium conveys deep reflections on contemporary society and human existence. His work, combining technical skill with conceptual depth, constitutes an important segment of the Croatian contemporary art scene.