Tomislav Buntak was born on April 24th, 1971 in Zagreb, Croatia. He graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1997. Since 2010 he has been teaching painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. He has been exhibiting at numerous solo and group exhibitions ( Zagreb, Split, MOMA P.S.1, New York, Tokyo Wonder Site (TWS), Spinnerei, Leipzig). In 2005, by the choice of Allane Heiss, manager of P.S. 1, the artist took part in the residential programme in New York, where he draw on even 180 square metres of the wall and ceiling the elongated figures of golden-silvery angels floating over the visitors’ heads intertwined on the ceiling and walls, drawn at the spur of the moment, without technical aids and without preparation. Buntak is the winner of a number of awards. His monograph was published in Zagreb, in 2012.
In the work of Tomislav Buntak, one of the most outstanding artists of his generation, there runs the religious theme from the very beginning; the artist doesn’t withdraw from the traditional painting and figuration. According to experts’ opinions Buntak is the best drawer of his generation, a human figure has been dominating on his canvases and murals from the very beginning; the most frequently it is a complex figural composition including a great number of figures where we can follow various themes from the religious and everyday life. He isn’t a realist regardless of his compositions created from real elements. Buntak represents faith in a dreamy, fantastic and spiritual world. His athletic figures of spindle-shaped bodies, mythological animals like griffin or unicorn, elongated figures folded up one over the other in a complex group survey are constant protagonists on his paintings. The spiritual background is present in his work, as he himself once said:” The basic ideal of goodness and generosity is the most important one.”
