Antun Motika (30 December 1902 – 13 February 1992) was a Croatian artist. He was an ahead of its time artist, not attached to any particular artistic studious or tendency. Motika was a prolific painter, who left at the back a great legacy.
Although he occasionally painted like oil on canvas, he generally preferred watercolor or gouache, whose application he preceded in the same way as a series of preparatory drawings in pencil or charcoal. From 1941 until his retirement in 1961, he worked at the School of Applied Arts in Zagreb, where he taught various courses. His paintings from the Cycles of Mostar are considered the most modern abstract landscapes in Croatian modernism. Motika’s exhibition Archaic Surrealism (1952), produced a mighty reaction among Croatian critics, and is considered “the boldest neglect of the dogmatic framework of socialist realism.” The exhibition has become the main topic of speculative and ideological a breath of roomy air among Croatian critics.
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