Josip Zanki

Josip Zanki (Zadar, 1969) is a Croatian painter, graphic artist, writer, and scientific researcher. He grew up in the village of Privlaka, northwest of Zadar. He graduated in 1994 from the Graphics Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in the class of Professor Miroslav Šutej, with a thesis on 'Mysticism in the Artistic Practice of J. Beuys' and an experimental series of etchings entitled New Machines. He received his doctorate in ethnology and cultural anthropology in 2016 from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Zagreb, defending his dissertation 'Anthropological Conceptualisation of Space in Thangka Painting and Contemporary Artistic Practices'. He has been publicly active since 1986 in the fields of graphic media, drawing, painting, experimental film and video, installations, performance, and cultural anthropology. His drawing and painting oeuvre is characterised by an exceptionally precise graphic manner — dense networks of ink lines with which he builds landscape compositions of monumental suggestiveness. In these works, motifs of the Dalmatian and Velebit landscape — dry stone walls, rocky terrain, forests of centuries-old trees — intertwine with spiritual symbols drawn from Tibetan Buddhist tradition, researched firsthand in thangka painting schools in Dharamsala, India. Key cycles include: 'Learning Thangka' (2014–2017) — a major series of works resulting from years of research into the thangka tradition; 'Mantra of Compassion' (2019) — an exhibition at the Galženica Gallery in Velika Gorica; 'On Dwarves and Trolls' (2011) — drawings that merge mythological imagination with graphic precision; and 'Bojinac' (2008) — a painting of a beech tree on a Velebit plateau twisted by the force of the bora wind, in the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art in Zagreb. Together with ethnologist Mirjana Trošelj, he published the book Mirila (2012). He served as President of the Croatian Association of Artists (2007–2018), and since 2018 has held the position of Vice President of this oldest and largest professional association in the region, founded in 1868. He taught at the University of Zadar (2009–2017) and at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas (2016–2017), and since 2017 has been a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. He participated in the Cairo Biennale (2008) and exhibited at the Noyes Museum of Art in the USA. He has realised over one hundred solo and group exhibitions in Croatia and internationally, and is the recipient of six Croatian art awards. He is a member of HDLU and the Croatian Freelance Artists' Association.