This Croatian-Canadian artist, active in Toronto for over forty years, has donated eighty works – prints, drawings and collages – created in the period from 1962 to 2015. The donation will be featured in an exhibition in the coming year to mark his eightieth birthday.
Anton Cetín, a native Croatian artist that has lived and worked in Canada for over forty years, has donated eighty works – prints, drawings and collages – created in the period from 1962 to 2015 to the Print Collection of the National and University Library in Zagreb. They will join the other works from his oeuvre already in the collection. The donation will be featured in an exhibition at the National Library in 2016 to mark his eightieth birthday.
Anton Cetín was born in the village of Bojana near Čazma, Croatia. He attended the School of Applied Arts in Zagreb. From 1959 to 1964 he studied printmaking at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, where he graduated in the class of professor Marijan Detoni. During his time in Zagreb he worked as an illustrator for a number of publishing firms before moving to Paris where he lived from 1966 to 1968, working for well-known illustrator J. M. Rabec and publisher Larousse. He then moved to Canada, now his permanent home, where he works as a professional painter and printmaker. He first visited Croatia in 1986 to publish a monograph and stage his first major exhibition of works at Zagreb’s Museum for Arts and Crafts. One of his valuable and better-known works is the print/poetry folio Amerika Croatan America, published in 1988 with Croatian writer Stjepan Šešelj. He has participated in over two hundred solo and group exhibitions and his work has not gone unnoticed abroad: documentary films have been shot about his work, in Germany’s Passau in 1990 and in Canada’s Toronto in 1993. In 2001 the City of Čazma founded the Anton Cetín Gallery in recognition of the eminent and internationally recognised painter and printmaker.
Anton Cetín is an artist with an idiosyncratic approach to painting and refined aesthetics. In the surrealist connotations of his painting we find the fragile figures of women, birds, houses, interstellar constructs and others. The female image, later assuming the name of Eve, often accompanied by a bird, constitutes an iconographic motif and metaphorical image that we find as a thread drawn through his entire oeuvre and as his inexhaustible thematic inspiration of the female aspect, fertility and love. His orientation towards the inner, spiritual preoccupations sets him apart from imitative art and brings him closer to the symbolically figurative. The clean lines and refined chromatic relationships render the content of the artistic form particularly expressive. His appeal to our senses constitutes an effort to break into our inner spiritual and emotional states – happiness, love, joy, pain and the like, to which he speaks in a language unique to him.
(NSK)
Anton Cetín donation to National Library print collection
Anton Cetín, a native Croatian artist that has lived and worked in Canada for over forty years, has donated eighty works – prints, drawings and collages – created in the period from 1962 to 2015 to the Print Collection of the National and University Library in Zagreb. They will join the other works from his oeuvre already in the collection. The donation will be featured in an exhibition at the National Library in 2016 to mark his eightieth birthday.
Anton Cetín was born in the village of Bojana near Čazma, Croatia. He attended the School of Applied Arts in Zagreb. From 1959 to 1964 he studied printmaking at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, where he graduated in the class of professor Marijan Detoni. During his time in Zagreb he worked as an illustrator for a number of publishing firms before moving to Paris where he lived from 1966 to 1968, working for well-known illustrator J. M. Rabec and publisher Larousse. He then moved to Canada, now his permanent home, where he works as a professional painter and printmaker. He first visited Croatia in 1986 to publish a monograph and stage his first major exhibition of works at Zagreb’s Museum for Arts and Crafts. One of his valuable and better-known works is the print/poetry folio Amerika Croatan America, published in 1988 with Croatian writer Stjepan Šešelj. He has participated in over two hundred solo and group exhibitions and his work has not gone unnoticed abroad: documentary films have been shot about his work, in Germany’s Passau in 1990 and in Canada’s Toronto in 1993. In 2001 the City of Čazma founded the Anton Cetín Gallery in recognition of the eminent and internationally recognised painter and printmaker.
Anton Cetín is an artist with an idiosyncratic approach to painting and refined aesthetics. In the surrealist connotations of his painting we find the fragile figures of women, birds, houses, interstellar constructs and others. The female image, later assuming the name of Eve, often accompanied by a bird, constitutes an iconographic motif and metaphorical image that we find as a thread drawn through his entire oeuvre and as his inexhaustible thematic inspiration of the female aspect, fertility and love. His orientation towards the inner, spiritual preoccupations sets him apart from imitative art and brings him closer to the symbolically figurative. The clean lines and refined chromatic relationships render the content of the artistic form particularly expressive. His appeal to our senses constitutes an effort to break into our inner spiritual and emotional states – happiness, love, joy, pain and the like, to which he speaks in a language unique to him. (NSK)
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This Croatian-Canadian artist, active in Toronto for over forty years, has donated eighty works – prints, drawings and collages – created in the period from 1962 to 2015. The donation will be featured in an exhibition in the coming year to mark his eightieth birthday.