Linas Leonas Katinas (1941–2020) was a Lithuanian painter, professor at the Vilnius Academy of Arts, member of the group “24” and winner of the Lithuanian National Prize for Culture and Arts in 1999. Trained as an architect, he turned to painting, his space of freedom and experiment in the Soviet era. From expressionism he moved to abstraction, pairing architectonic composition with cosmogonic symbols and collage, later with pictographs and Christian themes.
Linas Leonas Katinas (1941–2020, Radviliškis – Vilnius, Lithuania) was a Lithuanian painter and teacher. He graduated in architecture from the Lithuanian State Art Institute (now the Vilnius Academy of Arts) in 1964, but turned to painting, which in the Soviet period offered him a field of freedom and experimentation. From 1968 to 1992 he taught at the M. K. Čiurlionis School of Arts in Vilnius, and from 1992 to 2008 at the Vilnius Academy of Arts, where he became a professor. His early works show expressionist features, while in the 1970s and 1980s he moved towards abstraction, combining architectonic composition with cosmogonic symbols and using techniques such as collage. Later he introduced elements of conceptual art, pictographs, hieroglyph-like signs and Christian themes, and also worked with text and performance. He was a member of the artists’ group “24”. Katinas held solo exhibitions in Vilnius from 1967 onwards, as well as in Tallinn and Charlottesville, and in 1999 he received the Lithuanian National Prize for Culture and Arts. His works are held by the Lithuanian National Museum of Art, the M. K. Čiurlionis National Museum of Art, the MO Museum and the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. The acrylic “Composition” (1978), painted on canvas mounted on board and offered by TUMO Gallery, belongs to the period of his turn to abstraction.
