Mirko Virius

He was captured by Russians and made a forced laborer in Kiev, Kharkiv and the Ekaterinoslav iron plant.

In 1936, the writer Mihovil Pavlek Miškina introduced him to the painters from Hlebine, Ivan Generalić and Franjo Mraz.

[1] His opus is dominated by expressive and bleak depictions of social themes - peasant labor, the soil, poor villagers - best shown in paintings such as The Beggar, The Plowing, The Red Bull, The Overturned Cart, The Flour Exchange Office.

The prominent lines, the purity and elegance of his drawings prompted the critic Josip Depolo to call him "the Giotto of Podravina".

In the Second World War, Virius was arrested because of his Communist political activities and taken to a Nazi concentration camp in Zemun, where he was executed in 1943.