A master of sculpture and painting, an academic sculptor Pavao Hudek was born on  5th March 1944. in Marija Bistrica. Gornjoselska 20, Marija Bistrica, Tel. +385 49 469 125

Pavao Hudek, an academic sculptor, (1944 – 2009). He finished the primary school in Marija Bistrica and the secondary school in Zagreb. He graduated from the Academy of Art in Zagreb in 1969 in the class of the professor Augustinčić-Micheli. Hudek lived in Marija Bistrica his whole life. On the holiday of the Mother of God, 13th July 2002  as a part of a manifestation «Summer in Marija Bistrica 2002» he opened his long- expected gallery of  works.
On that occasion Monsignor Lovro Cindori, a former warden of the sanctuary said:
«...In the celebrations of  «Summer in Marija Bistrica 2002.» an academic sculptor Mr Pavao Hudek, by all means, takes a special place with his work. He gives a soul to Marija Bistrica through his landscape paintings. In his earth-made  and ceramic figures he gives praise to the Bistrica's land. Using some very remarkable shapes he wants to make the people from Bistrica's market eternal and with that he gave the sanctuary of the Mother of God in Bistrica his most intimate part in a longdreamed vision of beautiful colours. Mr. Hudek gives himself to the renewed Bistrica and  he will permanently stay in a beautiful gallery of a beautiful, old and noble house.
This is from Mirjana Šigir's critique on the occasion of the opening of an exhibition «Christmas in Heart»:
Pavao Hudek is an academically educated artist who consciously spent a lot of time to «liberate» himself as a creator from the academic standpoints and to return to the freshness of the orginality which all his works reflect today. The effort put in his own «liberation» is visible to a careful observer only in the compound of the sovereign mastery of sculpturing skill ( in the case of human figures: the knowlege of the anatomy, proportion, contrast, the shapings of the drapery in accordance with the body, the portraitivity of the physiognomies and the expressiveness of the language: the sums of masses in the architectural buildings of the altar and the organs related to the impression)  and almost naive overall impression each of Hudek's figures which is accomplished with the element of picturesqueness. That compound is visible in choosing of a challenging ceramic technique for a creative expression, as the experts will even better notice in Hudek's sculpturing in plaster, a material which lets only a quick and short intervention ( Jesus' Manger is the right  example ). To conclude,  Hudek does not forget the things taught at the Academy. The question is now, where is then his return to the originality? The first visible level is the already mentioned picturesqueness of his work. It is inevitably  ( in this moment of Hudek's career) his personal trade mark. It is not because he does not know the techniqe of putting the enamel on shaped figures, but because of the challenge of the freshness in his expression which comes from it. Hudek experiments with pigments and he lets, almost in full, to the fire of ceramic ovens to finish his work. By doing so he acts as a painter, deliberatly neglecting the laws of the volume. That makes a weird mixture of  painting and sculpturing in almost each work and there lays the secret of his original  freshness. The other, not less important component, is the selection of the motives. A  miniaturist by nature, Hudek possesses a fine sence of humor, which will remind the fans of  Jaroslav Hašek on his masterpiece «Dobri vojak Švejk». Inclined to take a step back  from the reality through the prism of humor, he will find the motives for his figures in the nearest surrounding; in the cycle of the figures of people: in front of the altars and on the choir of the churh of St Mary in Bistrica, among the pilgrims, in the Sunday walk, at the wedding, in the nearest pub,on the field; in the cycle of Christ's sufferings: Zagorje's village crosses on the crossroads; in the cycle of the small Zagorje's churches: the village baroque and classic altars and organs; and finally,a cycle of the Jesus' manger for his friends and relatives where he lets himself a freedom of the shapes and the physiognomies of the shepards and kings, which he very reluctantly repeats in a few orders of the church. A  distance  which we can explain with sculptor's commentary, in each case is done with care so that it could never be crossed the fine line between grotesque and mockery. There is always a fine humor which is made of compassion, understanding, well-meaning and the sympathy for the chosen motive. The artist reveals with it, and lays in front of us, a fine cobweb from which his dreams and he himself is made ( to paraphrase Shakespeare ). With it, he unconsciously speaks about the difference between the male and the female element ( that eternal polarity in nature ) in his opus, trying to inspire us not to be just  «an innocent bystander» next to his works, but to add our own part to that process.