Stojan Batič

Born in Trbovlje, he enrolled in the first generation of sculpture students at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana after the Second World War, which he had spent as a young man working in a mine and later as a partisan in the Kozjansko Detachment. He completed his studies under Prof. Boris Kalin and postgraduate specialist studies in sculpture under Prof. Frančišek Smerdu. He created an extensive sculptural oeuvre comprising public monuments and portraits, park sculptures, spatial decorative works, small-scale sculpture, prints and drawings. In 1960, he received the Prešeren Award for the Rudarji (Miners) series, followed by numerous other distinctions. In 2015, he was posthumously awarded the Silver Order of Merit. Since 2017, the Stojan Batič Memorial Studio, a reconstruction of his former working space, has been installed at Švicarija in Ljubljana's Tivoli Park.