Stojan Batic, Slovene sculptor, died at 90

  Dead Famous

Stojan Batic, born on February 2, 1925 and died September 17, 2015, he was a Slovene sculptor.

Mostly a figurative artist, he is particularly known for his sculptures exhibited in many public places in Slovenia.

Stojan was born in a working-class family in Trbovlje, a mining town in central Slovenia, then part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.

Already as a teenager, Stojan worked in the local coal mine.

At the age of 19, he joined the partisan resistance, which fought the Nazi German forces.

After World War II, he was the first to enroll at the newly established Academy of Fine Arts at the University of Ljubljana, where he studied sculpture under Boris Kalin and Francisek Smerdu.

In 1957, Stojan received a scholarship, which enabled him to study in Paris with the sculptor Ossip Zadkine.

Stojan lived and worked in Ljubljana. In 1995, he had a show at Ljubljana City Gallery.

In 2015, the Jakopic Gallery held a retrospective exhibition of his work under the title “The Man and The Myth” (Clovek in mit).

Stojan , predominantly a figurative sculptor, is known for about 40 public monuments depicting events from Slovene history, as well as European and Oriental myths and legends.

His best-known works include the monument to the Slovene peasant revolts at Ljubljana Castle featuring a group of men holding war scythes, and the Itaka series of figurative sculptures.

His 1957 bronze sculpture Balet (Ballet) stands in front of Tivoli Castle in Tivoli Park in Ljubljana.

In the 1960s, he created a mining-related series in lignite, and in the 1970s a series of glass sculptures, the two representing his most significant approach to abstract art.