Those who lived in Zagreb in the 1980s, during the new wave, certainly remember the play that marked a generation – “Studio for Image”. It is about a then-revolutionary theater piece that combined cabaret and rock, and which soon became a cult piece in the capital, writes Morning paper.
If you remember the play, then you haven’t forgotten the main actress Cintija Asperger either. After graduating from the Classical High School, she enrolled at the Academy of Dramatic Arts and, while still a student, became a star of Zagreb’s cinema and theater in the 1980s, and many considered her a sex symbol of the 1980s.
But Cintija met the Canadian Alan Eastman on the set of the mini-series “Race for the Bomb” and married him in 1986. Although she spent a short time in Croatia, she has been living in Canada since 1991. But she never neglected or forgot Croatia – in fact, she is happy to return, she directed several theater plays and was a vocal advocate of Croatian independence during the war, and now she is performing with another project.
However, this time it is neither a film nor a theater project. If we go back to the years when Cintija entered college, her choice fell on acting, but she actually hesitated between the seventh and fine arts. She has been working in the film and theater world for many years, including as an acting professor at the University of Toronto, but her love for painting has clearly never waned.
Cintija will show her artwork at her first exhibition. And that’s on order already this week – the exhibition titled “Debut Retrospective” opens in the “Trumbetaš” Gallery in Veliko Gorica (Zagrebačka 37) on Friday, June 12. The opening of the exhibition will be held at 19:00, and the exhibition will last until June 29.
In the catalog that represents her new step in life, which is reported by Mraclin.hr, it is stated that “private and professional circumstances took her to Canada early on, although she never severed her connection with Croatia, its theater, film and television”.
She has gathered experience in the last forty years in Canada and the USA – she has acted, directed, written scripts, sung and translated – and with all this, she returns more and more often to her roots in Lijeba naša. Now she found the perfect time to realize her second dream. She trained at the Art Students League in New York and in collaboration with numerous art educators from Canada and the USA in order to achieve this, the catalog points out.
At this exhibition, she will present works created from 1975 until today, and her most common motifs are portraits, animalistics and landscapes. “In all the mentioned thematic selections and motifs, the same driving force remains present: the joy of painting as a space of freedom, of returning to oneself and of a permanent dialogue between art and life,” academician Sanja Cvetnić wrote in her text about her.
The catalog concludes: “After last year’s group exhibition in Vrsar, her ‘Debut Retrospective’, the first solo exhibition, is not only an overview of that part of her artistic life that took place in the silence of the North American, Istrian and Zagreb studios, but it is an opportunity for Cintija Ašperger, after a decade of absence, to return to the Šantić sun where she truly belongs, with her colorful, and in the full sense, trumpet-like, emigrant pink.
