Mijo Kovačić, one of the most important figures of Croatian naive art and a prominent representative of the second generation of the Hlebine School, has died at the age of 91. His death marks the loss of a major artist whose work left a deep imprint on the cultural heritage of Podravina and Croatia.
Born on August 5, 1935, in the Podravina hamlet of Gornja Šuma, Kovačić built an artistic legacy that placed him among the leading names of Croatian naive painting. He was widely recognized for his distinctive scenes of rural life painted on glass, as well as for the singular visual world he created over decades of work.
The reports describe Kovačić not simply as a painter of village life, but as an artist who transformed those motifs into deeply felt, often dark, grotesque, and emotionally charged reflections on human fate, hardship, nature, and the bond with the land that shaped him. His paintings were portrayed as sincere records of the life of ordinary people, approached with equal seriousness whether he depicted love, everyday existence, or death.
Kovačić spent his childhood in a poor peasant family as the youngest of five children. The reports note that he was especially influenced by his mother Ana, whose folk stories, often frightening in tone, left a lasting impression on his imagination and later resurfaced in the mystical and apocalyptic imagery of his paintings.
His education remained limited, and after only a few years of elementary schooling he had to devote himself to work on the land. That early life in the fields became a formative part of his artistic sensibility. According to the reports, the days he spent tending the family cow became a kind of “academy in nature,” through which he developed a close knowledge of plant and animal life. The cow, in turn, became a recurring motif throughout his artistic career.
