French-Croatian painter, sculptor and poet, born on 21 August 1913 in Vinkovci (Croatia, then Austria-Hungary), died on 23 November 1995 in Paris.
Life
In 1933 he entered the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, in the class of Vladimir Becić, graduating in 1937. With a grant from the French government, he arrived in Paris at the end of 1939; the war cut his stay short and he returned in September 1940. He taught drawing in Mostar, then in Zagreb in 1941-1942. In February 1943 he left for Italy and settled in Florence, where he attended Felice Carena’s painting class, studied philosophy and exhibited on several occasions, notably in 1945 at the Galleria Michelangelo.
Settled in Paris at the end of 1948, he almost immediately met Jean Dubuffet, with whom he worked for many years. He joined the Compagnie de l’art brut and became the first curator of the collection assembled by Dubuffet, whose transfer to Lausanne he organised in 1975-1976. André Breton associated him with the Surrealist circle without his becoming a member: in 1949 Kopač illustrated Breton’s poem Au regard des divinités and in 1954 made a poem-object with him. In 1952 Michel Tapié cited him in Un art autre among the representatives of the Informel.
The work
Painter, draughtsman and sculptor, Kopač worked in oil, watercolour, pastel and ink, but also in collage, assemblage, ceramics and the artist’s book, readily mixing heterogeneous materials. In 1951 he published Le Soleil se couche au pays des éléphants, printed on six thin wooden plates. His work explores the female archetype as a generative and protective force (the series of Maternités), and hybrid forms drawn from an archaic imagery nourished by his interest in rock and wall art.
Exhibitions and collections
- 1949: first solo exhibition in Paris, Galerie Messages; 1953: Galerie À l’Étoile scellée, Paris
- 1957: Galerie Alphonse Chave, Vence (78 works); 1985: tribute to Jean Dubuffet, Galerie Alphonse Chave
- 1977: retrospective at the Modern Gallery, Zagreb; 1981: retrospective at the Paris Art Center; 1996: retrospective at the Hôtel de Ville de Paris (some 200 works)
- 2025: “Slavko Kopač. Il tesoro nascosto. Art informel, surrealism, art brut”, Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, Florence (13 September to 13 November)
- At the gallery: shown in “Favourites: Art Brut, Naive Art, Art Singulier” (15 March to 13 April 2024)