Biography
Stjepan Brlošić was born in 1918 in Piškorevci, by Đakovo. He enrolled in the Zagreb Academy of Fine Arts, sculpture course, in 1938, class of Frano Kršinić and Ivan Lozica, but because of the war had to break off his studies, which he was able to complete only in 1951, in Belgrade. After completing his Academy studies, he was a teacher in the high school in Osijek, and in 1961 he founded and was the director of the Gallery of Fine Arts in Osijek, up to 1973.
He devised the first permanent display of the Gallery of Fine Arts, and was also the founder of the ULUH Slavonia branch (1962).
Among the many exhibitions that he produced in the Gallery, the following stand out: Osijek Painters of the 19th Century; the big Hugo Conrad von Hoetzendorf Retrospective and the also major exhibition Art of the 18th century in Slavonia. He wrote many forewords for exhibition catalogues, and as sculptor often took part in the work of art colonies; he exhibited at many individual and collective exhibitions.
To start with, he mainly did portraits, but he often worked in wood (oak and linden), doing motifs of mother and child, and of rural Slavonian women. He went back to sculpting irregularly, for the administrative part of his work in the Gallery of Fine Arts took up much time and energy.
He also tried his hand at the making of memorials to soldiers in the Second World War, one of the most successful being the Passage over the Drava - a monument to the fighters killed in Donji Miholjac. In his own words, his father was a joiner, but most responsible for his work as a sculptor was his mother, who was a skilled weaver and needlewoman, from whom he learned harmony of forms and softness in modelling.
His greatest merit is to have urged the founding of and the arrangement of the building of the Gallery of Fine Arts in Osijek.
He was decorated with the Order of Labour, and received the Osijek City Prize.
NB: data taken from a questionnaire, material supplied from the Personal Archives of MDC on October 21, 2004.
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