An advocate of historicism in the visual arts, he is primarily known for his Serbian folklife motifs from the genre, portrait, sacral and historical paintings an illustrating folk calendars.
[3] After his studies, for one year (1891–1892), he attended lectures at the Department of Historical Painting, with Professor August Eisenmenger at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and after that, he worked as a freelance artist.
He spent the next two years in the town of Arco Varignane, moving to Tyrol on the advice of a doctor, after he had returned symptoms of tuberculosis, from which he became ill during his studies.
In July 1895 he came to Belgrade again and in September of the same year, he opened the Serbian Drawing and Painting School, situated in the neighborhood of Kosančićev venac (Kosančić wreath), from Kalemegdan to Brankovog mosta (Branko's Bridge).
After the attempt of Stevan Todorović thirty years earlier, Kutlik became the founder of the first private painting school in Belgrade, which became the cornerstone of art education in Serbia.
[3] His most notable student was Serbian painter Nadežda Petrović,[7] though he had other Serbian artists equally talented in their own particular genre such as Milan Milovanović, Kosta Miličević, Borivoje Stevanović, war painter Dragomir Glišić, Djordje Mihailović, Ljubomir Ivanović, Branko Popović, Natalija Cvetković, Anđelia Lazarević, and Rafailo Momčilović.
Kiril Kutlik is part of an Early Modernist Movement in Serbia along with Anton Ažbe, Beta Vukanović, Nadežda Petrović, Mihailo Valtrović, Milan Milovanović, Kosta Miličević, Borivoje Stevanović, and Ljubomir Ivanović.