Ivan Lozica was born in 1910 in Lumbarda, the first of seven children in the family of Antun and Ana Lozica Barbareško, a family of labourers and stonecrafters. He attended the stone carving artisanal school in Korčula, and in 1926, as an extremely talented youth, only just sixteen years old, was accepted as a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. His teachers there were Robert Frangeš Mihanović, Ivan Meštrović and Frano Kršinić.
After completing his course in 1933, he went on a French government scholarship to Paris for two years. Returning, he assisted Meštrović and Kršinić. In 1938 he became Kršinić’s assistant at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, and in 1940 was made professor. During the war he went to Lumbarda, where, for his socialist views, he was shot by the Italian fascists in 1943. He was 33.
In his short lifetime, Ivan Lozica managed to produce several hundred works that tell of his exceptional, lyrically-disposed talent, as well as his developed sense for the harmony and beauty of forms as well as for social themes.
