Survey exhibition of Drago Tršar’s monumental sculpture at the Moderna galerija in Ljubljana, 2018
Photo: Dejan Habicht / Moderna galerija, Ljubljana
In memoriam Drago Tršar
Drago Tršar, one of the most prominent modernist sculptors in Slovenia, has passed away.
Tršar was born on 27 April 1927 in Planina (near Rakek), where he completed primary and junior secondary schools. In 1943 he moved to Ljubljana, where he attended the private drawing school of France Gorše, and in 1944 went to work in the studio of sculptor Boris Kalin, where he was both his assistant and student until his mobilisation to the Gubec Brigade in 1945. After the war he enrolled in the sculpture department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana, graduating under Professor Peter Loboda in 1951, and then attended a postgraduate course in sculpture with Professor Frančišek Smerdu at the same academy. Tršar first worked as a freelance artist until he started teaching sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana, where he stayed until his retirement in 1997. He attended several sculpture colonies and studied in Italy, Russia, and Germany. He received numerous Slovenian and international awards, including the Prešeren Foundation Award (1966), the Rihard Jakopič Award (1972), the 4 July Award, and the Prešeren Prize for Lifetime Achievement (1990). He was a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts and a Professor Emeritus of the University of Ljubljana.
Drago Tršar was the most prominent representative of his generation of sculptors. Departing from the full or traditional rendition of the human figure (favored by his teachers Boris and Zdenko Kalin, Karel Putrih and Frančišek Smerdu) he deliberately turned to stylized, modernistically pared down, abstract figurative works. He gained renown at home and abroad with his sculptural renditions of crowds or masses of people, a monumental subject that is demanding in both form and content. In permutations through various media (from photography to drawing to sculpture) he transformed the image of a human pair, a line (of partisans), or the teeming humanity in a city into a universally human, archetypal image of a crowd of people as a demonstrating – or as he said, manifesting – community. The most imposing example of such figurative compositions is his Monument to the Revolution (1975) in Republic Square in Ljubljana. His works became increasingly abstract over the years, reaching in sculpture an equivalent to Art Informel in painting.
Tršar’s oeuvre in sculpture is vast, and thematically and formally very varied, ranging from subtly sensitive portraits (including several dozen portraits of prominent Slovenian public figures) to the now iconic small-scale, stylized figurative sculptures (e.g., Janjica, 1953, and Bull, 1955/56) and works with an existentialist stamp and an Art Informel feel (Man in Time and Space (Yo-Yo), 1964). He was also the author of the greatest number of public sculptures in Slovenia. He often produced works in series, perhaps the most famous among these being Manifestants – a group of demonstrators fused into a uniform mass with fists raised in the air. (All the works mentioned here included in Moderna galerija’s collection.) Tršar tried out new formal possibilities – such as perforated masses, “two-dimensional” flat forms, sculptures with painterly haptic surfaces, sculptures as frames or inner forms, etc. – and also worked in other media (printmaking, drawing, ceramics, tapestry, theater set design), producing one of the richest, most extensive, and formally most diverse artistic oeuvres in Slovenia. In 2018, Moderna galerija staged a large retrospective exhibition on the occasion of Tršar’s 90th birthday. Curated by Marko Jenko, PhD, and entitled Monument, the exhibition was part of a larger project involving collaboration with several other, regional museums and galleries.
Drago Tršar ati raz_ume
Exhibition Monument
