Mile Blazevic

Mile Blažević was born in 1954 in Maovice. He attended primary school in Solin and a secondary mechanical engineering school in Split. He began his artistic education in Split, where he graduated in fine arts from the Pedagogical Academy. He then enrolled in the Sculpture Department of the Zagreb Academy of Fine Arts, where he graduated in 1984 in the class of Prof. Ivan Sabolić, and whose Master's Workshop he attended until its closure in 1986.

He has been a member of the ULUH and ZUH since 1984. From the school year 1988/89 to 1995/96, he taught at the School of Applied Arts and Design in Zagreb. In the academic year 1996/97, he was employed as an assistant at the Sculpture Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. The following year, he was promoted to the title of assistant professor. In 2019, he retired as a full professor. While introducing numerous generations of students to the basics of sculpture, Blažević simultaneously researches and refines his own unique personal expression in his own studio (D. Glavan). He participates in competitions for public monuments, among which it is worth highlighting the first prize in the competition for the Monument to the Victims of Ramu in 1992 and the first prize in the competition for the monument to Nikola Tesla in Smiljan in 2006.

Mile Blažević's work is dedicated to the great themes of spiritual history (freedom, honor, nobility, suffering, love...). Work on these themes regularly resulted in great cycles (Knights, Crucifixion, Last Supper, The Way of the Cross, The Two...).

In his sculptures, Blažević actualizes the memory of the world and presents himself as a sculptor who consciously comes from tradition and who creatively remains within it responsibly.

The "spiritual simplicity" (D. Glavan) of the work is the dimension by which the tradition of sculpture in it takes on the form of modernity (M. Jozić).

Striving with equal zeal for the manual and métier elements of sculpture, as well as the speculative and conceptual components, Mile Blažević has built a unique position as a maintainer and challenger of tradition, without whose authorial contribution it is impossible to perceive the entirety of contemporary Croatian art production (D. Glavan).