Stojan Batič was born in 1925 in Trbovlje. In 1951, he completed his studies of sculpture with a specialisation at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana, where he studied with professors Boris Kalin and Frančišek Smerdu. Later on, as the first Slovenian scholarship recipient, he expanded his knowledge in Paris with the sculptor Ossip Zadkine. After that, he travelled extensively across Europe for his studies. His intense engagement in creating monument sculptures started in 1946 and includes just over thirty works. Slightly less prolific is his production of sculptures in the public space, which also includes the symposium sculpture at the Forma viva in Portorose and the Prometheus bronze figure at Tartini Square in Piran. In addition to public sculptures of a larger format, his personal sculpting opus is also extensive and diverse in content and includes a rich collection of small sculptures, and numerous furnishings of commercial buildings and ocean liners, as well as the series of portrait sculptures for public and private clients. In addition to sculpting in different materials, Batič engaged in drawing all along, even when it was not the conceptual template for his final sculpting realisations. The results of his creative opus were presented at many group and solo exhibitions in Slovenia and abroad. He received a plethora of awards for his work, including the Prešeren Award in 1960. Stojan Batič lived and died (in 2015) in Ljubljana.
Stojan Batič is one of the most important Slovenian representatives of post-war figural sculpting, which is not abundantly represented in the park of symposium sculptures in Seča. At the sculptors’ gathering in 1964, he created one of his interpretations of a generally popular miners motif. In his youth, the author worked for some time in the mining tunnels, which fundamentally marked his artistic opus. In the Ossip Zadkine’s style of perceiving sculpture, we can admire a disciplined analysis of a group of standing figures, which the artist resolved in a compact vertical composition. The surface of the stone was upgraded with a typical relief processing of individual planes, which in time became his signature artistic element. When moving around the sculpture, we can discern the mysterious world of the underground and segments of mining equipment inventory on the richly structured stone coat. With the expressive power of synthetic form, archaic monolithicity of the block, and the technique of bas-relief carving, Batič’s sculpting language does not conceal its monumental character which he faced during the formation of the monument sculpture.
