Ivo Lozica
(1910. – 1943.)
Sand Carrier, 1942
bronze
MG-1394
Ivo Lozica attended the Stonemasonry School in Korčula from 1923 to 1925, where he was taught by sculptor Frano Kršinić, who pointed him towards the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, where he studied sculpture from 1926 to 1930 (mentored by Rudolf Valdec and Robert Frangeš-Mihanović; in 1933 he completed sculptor Ivan Meštrović’s advanced course in sculpture). As a French government scholarship holder, he attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1933-1934. In 1935 he moved to Split and in 1938 he started teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. In 1942 he moved to his native Lumbarda on the Island of Korčula, where he was shot by Italian occupiers in 1943 because he was a member of the local Partisan Movement. He collaborated on Meštrović’s projects in Otavice (mausoleum) and Split (studio).
Drawing on the Mediterranean sculptural tradition (Frano Kršinić), particularly its understanding of light and form, and on his Parisian experiences (Aristide Maillol, Auguste Rodin and Antoine Bourdelle), Lozica created a unique oeuvre in a series of intimist, lyrically shaped nudes of round volumes and flickering surfaces, heralding the sculptural syntheses of figuration and abstraction taking place in Croatia in the post-WWII period.
In the early 1940s, Lozica started being more of a realist in his approach to modelling dynamic sculptures of social themes featuring motifs from typical life in Dalmatia. These sculptures bear witness to an obvious shift from Lyrical Abstraction to Realism, connecting social themes with unaffected figuration of expressively modelled volumes. His Sand Carrier from 1942 is a robust male nude of a pronouncedly tense musculature on the roughly modelled form of his heavily loaded body.
Text: Tatijana Gareljić, museum consultant of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Translated by: Ana Janković
Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb