Alfred Freddy Krupa

Biography

The first publication about Krupa appeared in 1990 in the Yugoslav weekly “Vikend”, when he was nineteen. His first exhibition took place the same year.

He was born on 14 June 1971 in Karlovac, then in Yugoslavia. His first teacher was his grandfather, Alfred Krupa the Elder (1915–1989), a native of Mikołów in Poland and an academically trained painter. He had studied with Józef Mehoffer and belonged to the circle of artists of the anti-fascist movement “Art of Croatia”. In Croatia the grandfather first exhibited at the show of Partisan artists in Topusko in June 1944. His grandson grew up in this artistic milieu. Krupa took his degree in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1995, in the class of Zlatko Kauzlarić Atač; his diploma subject was watercolour. As early as 1992 he had received a scholarship from the city of Karlovac. Later he briefly studied history at the University of Zagreb. In 1998 Krupa went to Tokyo on a Japanese government scholarship, to Tokyo Gakugei University, where he worked at the Research Institute for Fine Arts. The Japanese calligraphic tradition and Chinese ink on thin Japanese paper became the basis of his mature manner. In 2005 he received the title of professor of drawing and painting, and he has taught in primary, secondary and higher education.

In 1996 Krupa published the New Ink Art Manifesto. Since then he has been regarded as one of the Western representatives of this direction in ink painting. Critics describe his work as drawing in which a minimalist, almost mathematical calculation is joined to a sharp, direct gesture: in their words, the drawing rests on the contrast of black line and the white field of the paper. Among his known works are ink drawings on rice paper in the Japanese techniques of hakubu and hatsuboku, as well as landscapes, nudes and portraits. The art historian Nikola Albaneže wrote in 2000 that the Japanese experience pushed his landscape drawing to the edge of abstraction. That conclusion is hard to verify, but to me it seems accurate: in the later sheets only hints of landscape remain.

Krupa made official portraits: of the President of Croatia, Franjo Tuđman (1996), of the mayor of Karlovac and the prefect of Karlovac County, and in 2013 of Kigeli V, the last non-abdicated king of Rwanda. He illustrated collections of poems, published in newspapers and magazines, produced four portfolios of prints and drawings, and designed the official coat of arms of the municipality of Kamanje. The Irish poet Gabriel Rosenstock, with the New York publisher Cross-Cultural Communications, brought out a trilingual book of haiku and tanka, “Brightening of Days” (in Irish, English and Croatian), as a response to his work. Krupa’s photographs are built like his drawings, with the emphasis on composition and contrast.

In 1991–1992 he was a student volunteer in the Croatian War of Independence. During his studies and afterwards he belonged to the Croatian Association of Artists in Zagreb, to the Zagreb association LIKUM and to the International Society for Chinese Calligraphy and Ink Painting in Tokyo.

In 2016 Krupa gave a public lecture on contemporary ink painting at the Dag Hammarskjöld University College of International Relations and Diplomacy, before Japanese and Croatian listeners. He has held about twenty solo exhibitions in Croatia and abroad. His work has entered the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York (the artists’ books collection), the Silesian Museum in Katowice, the Alfredo Guati Rojo National Watercolour Museum in Mexico City, the Graphic Cabinet of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts and the City Museum of Karlovac. Among publications about him is a monograph issued in Zagreb in 2014; it and one original sheet from 2013, “Neo Minimalism” (ink, collage), entered the special library collection of Tate in London. In 2023 Krupa received the Order of Danica Hrvatska with the figure of Marko Marulić and the City of Karlovac Award.