Stojan Batič

Biography

Batič made his first monument, “The Hostage”, in the village of Radohova Vas in 1946, when he was twenty and had not yet finished his studies.

He was born on 2 June 1925 in Trbovlje, a mining town in central Slovenia, then part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. His was a working-class family. As a teenager he went to work in the local coal mine, and at nineteen he joined the partisans, the resistance movement, and fought against German forces. After the war Batič was the first to enrol at the newly opened Academy of Fine Arts at the University of Ljubljana. He studied sculpture under Boris Kalin and Frančišek Smerdu and completed the course, with additional specialisation, in 1951 as part of the first graduating class. His first solo exhibition took place in 1952 at the Small Gallery in Ljubljana. Even then he drew his subjects mostly from antiquity and from Slovene and European myths and legends. In 1957 he received a scholarship and became the first Slovene scholarship holder sent to Paris, to study with Ossip Zadkine. There he learned a rigorous analysis of the figure, in which the masses of the body’s parts are arranged in an almost geometric order. He went on to develop this foundation in both large works and small-scale sculpture, adding a characteristic relief treatment of surfaces and later a delicate graphic quality of finish. He drew throughout his life, even when a drawing did not become the basis of a sculpture.

From 1954 to 1959 he worked in Tivoli Park in Ljubljana, in the building known as Švicarija; his studio from 1 Svetec Street in Rožna Dolina has been reconstructed there. Of his Ljubljana works from those years, the fountain “Urška and the Water Man” (1957, at the Economic Exhibition Centre), regarded as the first Slovene mobile sculpture, and the bronze “Ballet” of 1957 in front of the mansion in Tivoli have survived. Later came the bust of Majda Vrhovnik (1961), the fountain “Youth Wheel” (1962), “Slovene Workers” (1975), a bust of the writer Prežihov Voranc (1980; stolen and replaced with a work by another sculptor) and “King Oedipus” in front of the Drama theatre (1997).

In 1960 he was given the Prešeren Award, the highest prize for artistic and cultural achievement in Slovenia, for the sculptural cycle “Miners”. In the 1960s he made a series in lignite, a brown coal, and in the 1970s a series of glass sculptures; these are his most significant steps towards abstraction. The cycle “Explosions” also belongs to the glass work: the glass was blown, the edges of the vessel torn away, and the whole form took shape around a bronze projectile lodged in its very centre.

Monuments make up most of what he is known for. The largest, at Dražgoše, he created together with the architect Boris Kobe and the painter Ive Šubic. Many stand in the Zasavje region and in the mining town of Velenje, others are scattered from the area around Trieste to Styria and Carinthia. The monument to the peasant rebels on the Ljubljana Castle plateau (1973) shows a group of men with war scythes. In 1990 his statue of Edvard Kardelj was removed from the university building. Besides monuments he made graceful small-scale sculpture, poetic and at times frankly erotic, on the theme of young female bodies and love play; several cycles from his mature years are devoted to classical and Slavic mythology. He also designed interiors for commercial buildings and ocean liners. By one count, over his life he made 37 monuments, 21 park sculptures, more than 250 small sculptures and about 140 portraits, held 38 solo exhibitions and took part in 86 group shows.

In 1988 the Zasavje Museum in Trbovlje opened the “Batič Salon”, a permanent display drawn from his donation; he became an honorary citizen of Trbovlje. In 1993 the cycle “Slovene Myths and Legends” was shown at Cankarjev dom, and in 2005, for his eightieth birthday, the exhibition “Ithaca”. In 2015 the Jakopič Gallery organised the retrospective “The Man and the Myth”.

Batič died on 17 September 2015 in Ljubljana and was buried at the Žale cemetery in Ljubljana.