Drago Tršar

Biography

In 1941 Drago Tršar was fourteen, and he decided to join the partisans. He served in the Gubec Brigade, where he was assigned to record the life of the unit in drawings.

He was born on 27 April 1927 in Planina, in the area near Rakek. His father was a blacksmith who made locks, the family lived reasonably quietly, and his parents supported the boy’s interest in art. At the time of his birth this region belonged to the Kingdom of Italy; later it became part of Yugoslavia, and today it is Slovenia. In 1943, at sixteen, he moved to Ljubljana and became a pupil of the painter France Gorše. He soon gave up painting for sculpture and went over to Boris Kalin. He then entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana, where his teachers included Zdenko Kalin, Karel Putrih and Peter Loboda. He took his diploma in 1951. Two years later, in 1953, Tršar founded “Group 53”. Its members were Milan Berbuč, Mire Cetin, France Peršin, Marko Šuštaršič, Melita Vovk and Marijan Tršar. With this group he held his first exhibitions, which were shown across Yugoslavia. The reputation he gained helped him win a scholarship, and in the 1950s he visited several European countries and Egypt.

From 1960 he taught at the same academy: as an assistant, from 1965 as a docent (associate lecturer), and from 1974 as a professor.

His work can be followed through a change of concerns. At first he worked on full sculpture in the round; from 1959 he was occupied with the “sculpture of mass”. In 1963–1964 he made a series of psychologically expressive portraits, and then began looking for a way to convey the “interior”, the core of a sculpture. It seems to me that this turn from the form outside to what lies beneath it is the main line of his work, though it is hard to judge from a single description.

In the 1950s and 1960s he took part in all the notable shows of Slovene and Yugoslav art at home and abroad. The international exhibitions included the Alexandria Biennale of 1955–1956, the Venice Biennale of 1958 and the São Paulo Biennial of 1960. In 1958 his work was in the Yugoslav pavilion at the World’s Fair in Brussels.

His known works include “The Equilibrists” in Tivoli Park in Ljubljana (1957), the “Monument to the Revolution” in Ljubljana (1975), a monument to Edvard Kardelj in Ljubljana (1981) and a monument to “The Revolution” in Vukosavci (1986). In 1967 Tršar received the Prešeren Prize, and in 1990 a lifetime achievement award. He was a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. His brother Dušan is also a sculptor.

Tršar died in Ljubljana on 10 April 2023.