Academic painter and graphic artist Miljenko Stančić finished high school in Varaždin, and from 1945 to 1949 he studied and graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. From 1949 to 1951, he attended a special graphic course with prof. Tomislav Krizman. He taught painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb from 1961 to 1977. He is a member of the group "Petorica" ​​(1955). In 1967 he lived in Brussels, and in 1969 in Paris.

The originator of the poetic-realistic trend in Croatian painting. From the very beginning, his painting developed as a distinctive and independent painting vision in which real, intimate, autobiographical and imaginary events are intertwined in a bizarre way, creating a fantastic world of events on the border between memory, dream and pure apparition. Using the technique of the old masters (Vermeer, G. de la Tour) he painted with astonishing perfection and refined tonal shading, and following the experiences of Josip Račić he created a unique poetic synthesis of old and new, nostalgic and contemporary. A significant part of his oeuvre consists of views of his native Varaždin, mostly deserted streets and squares, outlines of baroque churches and roofs in the dim dusk light. From 1954, he painted phantasmagoric metamorphoses of human figures and compositions with metaphysically calm figures in strangely lit poetic interiors where, around 1958, the tendency towards a flat and decorative understanding of the surface prevailed. In the latter period, he created works in which he tried to achieve new chromatic values ​​by breaking down the painted surface. The changes that he gradually introduced into painting after 1970 mean, first of all, the enrichment of motifs with the erotic content of harmonious organic forms from which the fullness of life's energy emanates.