Vladimír Kopecký

Vladimír Kopecký is known mainly as a artist working with glass. He was born in Svojanov, though after the war his family moved for a short time to Děčín, where the proximity of the famous glass schools had a great influence on him. In 1946, he began his studies at the school of glassmaking in  Kamenický Šenov, and later moved to Nový Bor, where Stanislav Libenský was a young teacher.

Even before completing his school studies he had been accepted at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design, where he studied at the Josef Kaplický studio, graduating in 1956. His classmates included Jiří John and Adriena Šimotová, and Kopecký was invited to join the UB 12 group (one of whose members was Alena Kučerová, who became his wife), an invitation he declined. In 1958, he worked on the Brussels EXPO.  

Kopecký’s work can be divided up using two seemingly contradictory principles: strictly geometrical painting on the one hand, and expressive, “ugly” glass artefacts on the other. At the start of his career he focused on painting. A solo exhibition at the Václav Špála Gallery (the last exhibition under the direction of Jindřich Chalupecký) displayed his paintings of geometric structures. Kopecký used mainly coloured patterned linoleum as a base. The ornamentation of the linoleum is in contrast to the strictly geometric blocks (Přestávka / Break, 1969, Východ slunce / Sunrise, 1972). During the late sixties and seventies these constructional elements culminated in a pair of large designs (built and installed to this day) for glass mosaics to be embedded in architecture, specifically for the building of the Electro-technical Testing Institute in Prague and the headquarters of the Želivka water treatment plant in Hulice.

Architectural design occupies a special place in Kopecký’s oeuvre. His first commission for a public space was the decoration of the Havířov railway station and took the form of a monumental mosaic spread over 65 m² featuring the motif of a dove made of coloured glass (1963). He also created a sculpture for the clock in Ostrava-Vítkovice railway station (1966).

Vladimír Kopecký also created several sandblasted glass walls, mainly for hotel interiors. These included the Vítkov Hotel (Prague, 1966–67, destroyed during a gas leak), Olympik (Prague, 1969–70, removed during later refurbishment), the coffee bar of the Hotel Bohemia (Ústí nad Labem, 1981–82, also removed during refurbishment), the military sanatorium in the Jeseník spa resort (1975–76, not preserved). He and Vjačeslav Irmanov created the wall made of concrete and glass vertical in the entrance to the building of the Kavalier glassworks in Sázava.

His contributions to architecture included sandblasted glass walls for the funeral parlours in Vsetín (1973, not preserved) and Děčín (1974), as well as walls for the building of the Czechoslovak TV transmitter in Strahov (1974) and the building of the TV News in Kavčí hory (1978). He created decorative glass objects in Prague for the building of the engineering company ČKD on Wenceslas Square in Prague (1979) and the Hotel Legie (1989).

He also carried out commissions abroad (Konica House in Tokyo, 1988–89, the town hall in Toyama, 1992, an insurance company in Nieuwegein, Holland, 1984, the Technologiezentrum in Coburg, Germany, 1994, etc.).

In the late 1970s Kopecký created his first layered glass objects. Contained within is a geometrical effect of tables placed in a row so creating depth with the aid of painted, glued or sandblasted segments. Glass becomes the dominant material in his work. Kopecký himself said of his “court” work: “Glass is not my subject matter but simply a means to unknown ends... Glass does not glorify. It lends itself to being handled in different ways, even in antithesis to received ideas, i.e. in an ugly way. I myself coined the term ugly glass at the start of the 1970s. It’s not that I think glass must always be like that. […] I want the finished glass product to provide the observer with a deeper meaning and not simply to display the properties of a material. These properties are certainly unique, but it is not enough to build only on them. In my work, which is strictly geometrical and spontaneous, I try to express everything that fascinates me: the infinity of space, silence, anxiety and melancholy...” [Cited from Vladimír Kopecký’s catalogue to the exhibition at the Prague City Gallery, 1999.]

Kopecký continued to experiment with layered structures up to the turn of the eighties. An important milestone was reached in 1982, when he began to use a technique that involved coating an object in paint and then applying this to his glass works, so linking painting and glass. Later he was to add an action element in the form of happenings during which he poured glass in public.

He included waste materials in his installations of this period (the offcuts of glass produced in the manufacture of pane glass and bricks) along with railway sleepers (Slepá kolej / Dead-end Sidings, 1987), and from the end of the eighties used parts of rails to smear coloured pastes.

He created a monumental installation from pane glass poured with paint for Expo 92 in Seville, and depicted a railway accident in an 11-metre object.

At the end of the nineties Kopecký once again returned to painting, using the layering and smearing of coloured pastes in expressive canvases as he had in his installations (Duben / April, 2002).

In 1990 he took over directorship of the glass studio at the Academy of Applied Arts, where he remained until 2008.

Vladimír Kopecký’s work represents a unique combination of seemingly disparate materials and aesthetic approaches. He is known for his glass artefacts abroad, though his paintings and graphic designs (especially his screen prints) are still somewhat overlooked.

In 2009 he was recognised by the Ministry of Culture for his contribution to fine art.  

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