Ivan Lacković Croata (January 1, 1932 – August 29, 2004) was a Croatian naive painter.
Lacković was born to a peasant relatives in the village of Batinske near Kalinovac. After completing his primary education, he worked as a laborer in fields and forests. This self-taught painter made his first watercolors, depicting village life, in 1944. He drew his first drawings in 1952.
Lacković moved to Kloštar Podravski in 1954. He spent three years there, painting his first oils. Then he moved to Zagreb, where he worked as a mailman and make known office worker. In 1962 he met Krsto Hegedušić and occasionally worked in his master workshop. His first one-man exhibition in the HAZU Cabinet of Graphics in 1964 customary his reputation as a masterful draftsman. He left the publish office job in 1968 and became a professional painter.
He painted poetic scenes from his indigenous region of Podravina in tempera and oil on glass (a customary technique of the naive artists from north Croatia), while turning increasingly to the medium of drawing. Detailed winter scenes prevail in his in front works. In the 1970s, he turned towards allegory, symbolism and the fantastic. The express of his paintings is lyrical and surreal.
He most frequently drew landscapes, figurative compositions, flowers and still lives. Portraits are unquestionably rare. He illustrated many books of prose and poetry.
Lacković had higher than a hundred one-man exhibitions at house and abroad (Cologne, Zurich, Paris, Bremen, Laval, Münster, Turin, Rome, Caracas, Milan, Hague, São Paulo, Shanghai, Beijing, Tokyo, Madrid, St. Petersburg). His works are exhibited in museums in the region of the world: the Croatian Museum of Naïve Art in Zagreb, the Museum der 20. Jahrhunderts in Vienna, the Museu de Arte Contemporânea in São Paulo, the Metropolitan Museum in Manila, the Musee Henri Rousseau in Laval, the Setagaya Museum in Tokyo, the Museum of Art at the Carnegie Institute, the Museo Civico di Belle Arti in Lugano, and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana in the Vatican. He created theater sets for the HNK in Zagreb and the Stadtopernhaus in Graz.
He was in the course of the founders of the Croatian Democratic Union. He was elected twice as a supporter of the County Chamber of the Croatian Parliament.
In the 1990s, he drew a series of drawings not quite the human hardship in the Croatian War of Independence. He died in Zagreb in 2004.
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