Bruno Zupan

Bruno Zupan was born June 21, 1939 in Slovenia. Once his studies in Zagreb, Croatia were completed he emigrated to Paris where he enjoyed a thoroughly bohemian lifestyle. He traveled to the United States in 1964 and became an American citizen in 1969. He has been honored with over one hundred and fifty one man shows in museums and galleries in the United States, Europe and Japan, and has published fifty limited edition graphic works in Paris and Mallorca. In 1976 he was awarded life membership in the Society of French Artists, and in 1981 and 1991, received special commissions to create First Day Covers for the World Federation of United Nations Associations Philatelic Program. The Columbus Museum of Art curated his first retrospective exhibition to coincide with his sixtieth birthday and the new millennium in February, 2000. To accompany the event two books were published. Bruno Zupan, One Artist presents a large selection of his contemporary work in oil and watercolor at the same time describes his unique lifestyle and painting technique. Bruno Zupan, Graphic Work is a complete catalogue of his serigraphs and lithographs. A new book about his watercolors will be published soon.

Zupan prefers to paint en plein air rather than in his studio, and his locations of choice are Mallorca, Venice, and Paris. He must have a deep emotional relationship with the subject he chooses to paint, and that intimacy allows him the freedom of expression best described by reviewer Ed McCormack after visiting his one man show in New York.

The real magic is in the paint surface itself, with its energetic bravura strokes, splashes, splatters and drips forming a unified statement, as active, alive, and visually autonomous as an Abstract Expressionist work by de Kooning or Diebenkorn, yet simultaneously evoking the world outside the canvas. Among contemporary painters, Bruno Zupan alone possesses the singular sensibility to strike such a perfect balance between surface and subject, between a convincing pictorial lyricism and the matter-of-fact materiality that is the even larger truth and triumph of the most advanced modern art.

Excerpt from Zupan catalogue, 2004.