Artist Tomislav Horvat from Međimurje creates stunning sculptures using matches. This process requires a great deal of time, persistence, effort, and patience. He often wakes up at 4 a.m. and works on his sculptures until 7 a.m. before heading to work. His love for art began while he was still a student at the high school of civil engineering. He has always enjoyed drawing and attended various drawing workshops as a child. His curiosity about art was piqued during high school art history classes. It was then that he became fascinated by Italian Renaissance mosaics made of ceramics, which led him to the idea of creating three-dimensional works using matches, which were easily accessible to him.
Initially, he created models of various buildings, churches, windmills, fortresses, and even a laptop using matches. However, after five years, he sought a greater challenge and began working on more demanding sculptures. His first major sculpture, ‘The Godfather’, was inspired by the film trilogy and incorporated 117,000 matches. He then created ‘The Pianist’ inspired by Mozart, which required 210,000 matches. One of the sculptures in his collection is called ‘Desperate’, depicting a man parting from his family, made using 54,000 matches. Currently, Tomislav is working on a sculpture titled ‘The Creator’, depicting Michelangelo working on his masterpiece David. It already contains 400,000 matches, and he estimates another 1.5 to 2 years to complete it. He has used about a million matches throughout his entire body of work and has no plans to stop creating sculptures in the future.