Slavko Kopač. The Hidden Treasure. Informal Art, Surrealism, Art Brut arrives in Florence

The Academia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence hosts the first major retrospective in Italy dedicated to the Franco-Croatian artist Slavko Kopač, a key figure in the intersection of Surrealism, Informel, and Art Brut. Eighty years after his first solo exhibition in Florence, at the Galleria Michelangelo on Via Porta Rossa in 1945, Kopač returns to the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, where he himself was a student between 1942 and 1948.

The exhibition unfolds around two key moments in the artist's life: the Florentine period between World War II and the reconstruction (1943–1948), when Kopač developed a personal language that earned him recognition and success, and the Parisian period, when he met Jean Dubuffet and André Breton and where he played a decisive role in the birth and promotion of Art Brut.
The exhibition also explores the artist's connections with the artistic movements that defined the 20th century. Kopač never personally practiced Art Brut, but he is known to have supported and promoted it. He had close ties with Surrealist artists, but never formally joined the group. In relation to the artistic movements of his time, he always maintained his own autonomy, without giving himself a proper label.
Kopač positioned himself among the artists of the New Informal Art movement, along with Burri, De Kooning, Dubuffet, and Fautrier, and like them, he felt the need to return to the primordial nature of the creative gesture and form.
Through oil paintings, drawings, watercolors, collages, ceramics, and artist's books, the Florentine exhibition tells us about his poetic world made of essences and visions, characterized by an interest in cave and parietal art and the female archetype as a generative and nurturing force.
A versatile and multifaceted artist, Kopač experimented extensively with materials, using painting, sculpture, and mixed media, constantly reinventing his artistic language.
A must-see exhibition for lovers of 20th-century art.