Bogdan Borčić

Biography

In 2004 Bogdan Borčić returned to Dachau for the first time since the war: an exhibition of his paintings was organised there. The last time he had been in that camp, he was a prisoner, in August 1944.

He was born on 26 September 1926 in Ljubljana, to a Slovene mother and a Croatian father. He spent his childhood with relatives in Komiža, on the island of Vis. After the German invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941, at fifteen, he is said to have joined a resistance group and made leaflets. He was arrested and held in a juvenile prison, and on 10 August 1944 he was sent to Dachau. In the camp he fell seriously ill and barely survived, then worked in labour details, at the end in the clothing store, and illustrated an underground Slovene camp newspaper. The camp was liberated by American troops.

After the war Borčić studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana; according to some accounts, from 1945, under Gojmir Anton Kos. He graduated in 1950 and continued with a postgraduate course under Gabrijel Stupica, with whom he stayed friends after his studies. There were study trips to Amsterdam and Paris. In Paris in 1958–1959 he worked for three months in the studio of the printmaker Johnny Friedlaender. From 1969 Borčić taught at the same academy. The year he became full professor of printmaking is given differently: 1976 and 1979 are both named; by some accounts he taught until 1984. At the invitation of the academy in Mons, Belgium, he lectured there for a month on printmaking. Gradually he concentrated on printmaking. His prints are held by many museums around the world, among them the Albertina in Vienna. His best-known motifs, the shells, sit in his output alongside series in various classical printmaking techniques. At the Božidar Jakac Gallery in Kostanjevica na Krki there is a separate Bogdan Borčić Prints Cabinet, with more than a thousand of his sheets.

From 1980 he lived and worked in Slovenj Gradec. His later work includes glowing paintings with large areas of colour and added elements. He devoted a series of paintings to Dachau: in these visions he re-created the door of the crematorium and the doors of the cells. His last portfolio of prints, “In principio erat Dachau”, appeared in 2014. His last series of paintings, shown in Ajdovščina in April 2014, is built around a smoking pipe, painted or made from glued-on objects. It seems to me that these two subjects, the camp and the pipe, read side by side in his late work, although as far as is known he never linked them himself.

In 1965 Borčić received the Prešeren Fund Award for paintings shown in an exhibition in 1964; in 1982, according to some accounts, the Jakopič Award; and in 2005 the Prešeren Award itself for lifetime achievement. He donated a collection of his paintings to the Carinthian Gallery of Fine Arts in Slovenj Gradec, and in 2004 received the Valvasor Honorary Award for it.

Bogdan Borčić died on 24 April 2014 in Slovenj Gradec.