Slavko Kopač – Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, Italy

12 Sep — 13 Nov 2025

The exhibition The Hidden Treasure: Slavko Kopač – Informal Art, Surrealism, Art Brut, at the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence, highlights a fundamental chapter in the history of 20th-century art through the work of Slavko Kopač (1913-1995). Eighty years after his first solo exhibition in Florence at the Galleria Michelangelo in Via Porta Rossa in 1945, the exhibition retraces the extraordinary career of this Franco-Croatian artist, an enigmatic and complex figure who embodied the innovative and interdisciplinary spirit of an era of cultural rebirth from the ruins of the postwar period. The exhibition is organized around two central moments: the Florentine period, which marks the maturation of Kopač’s artistic language, and the Parisian period, during which the artist emerged as a pivotal figure at the crossroads of Surrealism, Informal Art, and Art Brut.

Through a selection of oils, drawings, watercolors, artist’s books, poems, engravings, collages, assemblages, and ceramics, spanning the period from the postwar years to the 1960s, the exhibition reveals Kopač’s extraordinary versatility, as he moved seamlessly between painting, sculpture, mixed media, and material experimentation, continually reinventing his expressive language. Through this rich selection of works and archival materials, the exhibition explores Kopač’s connections with the artists and movements that defined the 20th century, reconstructing the cultural context and the networks of exchange that shaped his artistic evolution. Particular focus is placed on Florence as a cultural crossroads, which played a key role in fostering artistic dialogue between Italy and France. The exhibition underscores the interdisciplinary dimension and creative intensity of this pivotal historical moment, whose legacy continues to profoundly influence the contemporary art scene.

Like Jean Dubuffet, André Breton, or Max Ernst, Kopač explores a visual language aimed at delving into the archetypal roots of human experience. His work unfolds within a creative tension that reflects both the chaos and fragmentation of the postwar period and a deep need to reconnect with the playful, primal, and collective essence of art as a universal and timeless act. The exhibition display therefore is precisely in the service of telling Kopač’s visual language, which he invented through a lifetime of artistic creation.

Books

Slavko Kopač

£32.00