Alfred Krupa Edit Profile

also known as Freddy

Background

Ethnicity: Father was of mixed Jewish lineage from Poland, mother was Croatian.

Alfred Freddy Krupa comes from a multiethnic Silesian family of a long tradition in visual arts. His family appears in archives of the International Tracing Service as the registered victims of Nazi persecution. Krupa was born on 14 June in 1971 in Karlovac Croatia.

Education

Alfred studied at primary school in Karlovac, Croatia and secondary school in Zagreb, Croatia. In 1991 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Croatia. In 1995 he became a Master in painting. In two years he was a student of the University of Zagreb in Croatia. He studied at the faculty of art history. From 1998 to 1999 Alfred studied at Tokyo Gakugei University in Tokyo, Japan at the faculty of Japanese painting.

Education period of Alfred Krupa in Academy of Fine Arts

Career

Krupa was born in Karlovac, Croatia, where there’s a confluence of four rivers: Kupa, Korana, Mrežnica, and Dobra. And by chance or destiny, water became a fundamental creative element during his future work as a painter. For example, one day, Alfred was walking on the shore of the Adriatic Sea, which reaches the Croatian coasts. At that time, he was still studying art and, as is often the case with students, his steps probably ran ahead one after the other with a fast pace on his way to class. Alfred held a folder full of designs beneath his arm: drawings made with sepia ink. As is often the case on the Adriatic coast, a gust of wind swept the seafront hitting the young painter –unprepared by then– and the entire content of the folder flew into the water. Alfred hardly managed to rescue his works: “...I discovered something completely new for me. And after that, I often practiced the ‘bath’ of my works at sea. In a conceptual level, this form of art is completely real and on the edge of the global artistic explorations of our time. However, beyond the coincidences and anecdotes, Alfred Krupa recognizes as an impetuous inspirational source the figure of the homonymous grandfather: one of the most outstanding watercolorists in Yugoslavia, as well as an amateur boxing champion and smart inventor. Thanks to him in the magnificent atmosphere of Heinrich Palace in Karlovac–Alfred was able to interact with the smell emanated by colors, oils, and the infallible turpentine from a young age. He indeed grew up in a continuous flow of creativity and intellectual reflection.

Internationally Krupa is known as a painter of portraits, so among other things, he portrayed Croatian President Franjo Tudjman in 1996 and Rwandan King Kigeli V. in 2013. Significant, exquisite are his ink paintings, on rice paper using the technique Hakubyou. Krupa concentrates on essential and represents a simplified stylistic motif. His work in the ink is considered to be of vital importance for the global integrity of the Modern ink painting, and he is considered as one of the essential representatives of national and international present-day art.

Krupas original works on paper can be researched at Tate - London (Special Library Collection), Silesian Museum in Katowice (Poland), Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts – Dept. of Prints and Drawings (Zagreb, Croatia), Alfredo Guati Rojo National Watercolor Museum (Museo Nacional de Acuarela Alfredo Guati Rojo)-Mexico City (Mexico), Office of the President of the Republic of Croatia (Zagreb, Croatia) and other public, corporate and private collections.

Achievements

Krupa is the best known modern ink painter of Europe.

Works

An anxious hand of a photographer An anxious hand of a photographer

Self-portrait in watercolor Self-portrait in watercolor

The unfinished portrait (Lilian) The unfinished portrait (Lilian)

The tree on the riverbank The tree on the riverbank

The marketplace at night The marketplace at night

A humid winter morning at Kupa river A humid winter morning at Kupa river

Snow falling, the birches, the Edison Cinema Snow falling, the birches, the Edison Cinema

painting
- The pebble boat
  
  (New European Painting, Sumi-e (Suiboku-ga). Landscape.)
  2018
- Self-portrait in watercolor
  
  (Neo-Figurative Art, New European Painting. Self-portrait.)
  1996
- The Red One
  
  (Neo-Figurative Art, New European Painting. Nude painting ...)
  2017
- Two towers
  
  (New European Painting, Neo-Figurative Art. Cityscape.)
  2007
- The unfinished portrait (Lilian)
  
  (Neo-Figurative Art, Contemporary Realism. Portrait.)
  1998
- Snow falling, the birches, the Edison Cinema
  
  (Sumi-e (Suiboku-ga), Neo-Expressionism. Veduta.)
  2018
- The Rorschach test
  
  (Art Informel, Ink and wash painting. An abstract, symboli...)
  1994
- An anxious hand of a photographer
  
  (Photorealism, Neo-Figurative Art. Portrait, figurative.)
  1988
- A standing nude
  
  (Neo-Figurative Art, New Realism. Nude painting (nu).)
  2016
- The tree on the riverbank
  
  (Sumi-e (Suiboku-ga). Landscape.)
  2014
- A humid winter morning at Kupa river
  
  (Post-Impressionism. Landscape.)
  2017
- Red water lilies
  
  (Post-Impressionism. Landscape.)
  2016
- The marketplace at night
  
  (Street Photography. Cityscape.)
  2015
- Ozalj
  2002

Views

Alfred is a secular humanist. He realized that pulling the line of the ink (or something else) to show the bare essence, i.e.the reduction of the expressive means only to the choice of direction, length, and thickness of the line (Minimalism, Reductivism, Hakubyou), has a multidimensional (from 3 + 1) and a mathematical basis (something that the brain makes in the semi/multi-dimensional level, and the artist perceives as “a sense, feeling” and “a spontaneity”(informalism, art Informal), but basically represents a mathematical fraction, a fragment, a vector (as we have in music, for example) and where the mind of the artist just recognizes and monitors already existent “gravitational” forces, directions, building blocks on the “blank” surface of the board, canvas, paper, where the mind of an artist follows through the insight into another “alternative” dimension the most common, most meaningful inner, i.e., hidden, forms which we see not in “material” nature.

Quotations: Alfred Freddy Krupa in March 2017 during interview for the Chilean art magazine AAL stated: "As I grow older, my art also becomes more mature. Everything changes in relation to the simplification and synergy of complex forms. That cannot be achieved without the processing of the existence and artistic experience. The inner life comes to the surface stronger than in youth. I seek a higher expression and that is at the end of the process of multidimensional reduction to “essential forms”: some sort of “neo or re-minimalism.”

Membership

Croatian Association of Artists , Croatia

1995 - 2018
ICCPS - North America Branch , United States

2012 - 2018
European Academy of Arts , France

2016 - 2018
Croatian society of art historians , Croatia

1997 - 2000
Cooperative of Croatian artists , Croatia

1996 - 2013
Croatian Association of Artists , Zagreb

2015 - 2018
INSEA - Croatian Council

1995
Croatia-Japan Academic Society

2016 - 2018

Personality

Always quiet and silent in life, but in contrast to exhibitions, graphic maps, and books, Alfred Freddy Krupa now has a huge and recognizable artistic opus behind that new realizations, and I would like to say new author's adventures, to be upgraded with the logic of the artist's insight into the essence of art technique as a meticulous skill as well as constant personal spiritual strength. (Mladen Muić, 2008)

Physical Characteristics: Alfred has brown hair, brown eyes, once red beard, 170 cm tall.

Quotes from others about the person

Ante Vranković (an art historian & an art critic, a bearer of the University of Zagreb Rectors Award, CRO): Krupa`s authentic discourses are brilliant and eloquent, and therefore they, in a constructive way, remove the cluster of mystification which even today is so typical for the most of reflections on the emergence of a work of art.

Casey Shannon (an artist, the lecturer at the Cabrillo College CA, USA): He poses many important theories and questions for the artist community and scientific community to think about and shows us a different way of thinking.

Yan Luo (Inkston, China): I am Chinese. I like to see elements of 禅 in his ink paintings but I also feel there is something extra which is very new to me in his artworks.

Nikola Albaneže (executive editor of the Art Magazine Kontura and former curator at Dpt. of Prints and Drawings of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts-Zagreb): Intensified monochrome reductions of Chinese ink applied with a strong move to the delicate Japanese paper only reinforced expressive qualities in the relationship between the display and the substrate. Illusionist believability gave way to a specific voltage of a creative expression of these very restrained, suppressed explicitly.

Dr. Andreas Berlakovich (1932-2008, Austrian diplomat, ambassador, and painter): Drawings, and delicate translucent watercolors, transmitted to us concentrated expression of being, personality, and things, just

because they are limited to the most important, the line itself. And in the line, Krupa is the strongest so far!

Many great masters of art knew the expression lines. We think only on the nerve lines of Durer, or Rembrandt, or those of Piccaso, Miro ... I must say that Krupa works as his craft has been taught by them.

Dr. Jürgen Weichardt (an art critic & an art historian, DE): The Japanese influence is obvious in the lines and in the way the brush paints trees and landscapes. Also the differentiation of grey minds of the Japanese masters. But sometimes Krupa solves himself from the connection to landscape and nature forms and he gives the brush free movements which seem to be near the European informal. In a certain way, Krupa's work is a bridge between Japanese and European painting of today.

Der japanische Einfluss ist unverkennbar in der Linienführung und im Lauf des mit Farbe gesättigten Pinsels. Auch in der Differenzierung des Schwarz zu feinen Grauwerten ist die Erinnerung an japanische Meister unübersehbar. Aber zuweilen löst sich Krupa von der Bindung an gegenständliche Formen, an Baum, Strauch und Wege und gewährt dem Pinsel freien Lauf zu einem Pinselschwung, der damit eine Nähe zum europäischen Informel andeutet. In gewisser Weise ist Krupas Malerei eine Brücke zwischen der japanischen und der europäischen Tuschmalerei.

Ransui Yakata (an artist, the Head of ICCPS-Tokyo, JP): Mr. Alfred’ works are very original and also a sanctuary of modern ink painting. He has a very fresh technique and we can feel the breath of life from his brush line.

Interests

Philosophers & Thinkers

Socrates, Richarda Dawkins, C.G. Jung.
Writers

Kafka, H.Hesse.
Artists

Vlaminck, Sisley, Pissaro, Singer-Sargent, Sesshu, Rembrandt, Toulouse- Lautrec.