Biography

Vasko Lipovac (June 14, 1931 – July 4, 2006) was a Croatian painter, sculptor, printmaker, designer, illustrator andscenographer and one of the most prominent artists of the region.  He is best known for his minimalist figuration and use of intense, unmodulated and often dissonant palette. With the exception of his juvenile period of geometric abstraction, he remained loyal to figuration throughout his whole career. Exceptionally prolific, he worked in various techniques and was equally skilful in using high-polished metal, polychromous wood, enamel, terracotta or polyester to create his sculptures, reliefs and mobiles.

Biography

Vasko Lipovac was born on June 14, 1931, in Škaljari, a small coastal settlement near Kotor in Montenegro. He was the youngest of five children in a very harmonious family of a prosperous merchant and a shipping agent Spasoje Lipovac and Antica Lui, the daughter of a respectable landowner Maksimilijan Lui. He attended Real Grammar School in Kotor, where his drawing teacher was Mato Đuranović (1895–1973), the painter who inspired his students with the bright, shiny colors of his works.

After graduating from the secondary school, he moved to Zagreb, Croatia in 1950 and enrolled in the Academy of Applied Arts. He initially chose sculpture, in the class of Kosta Angeli Radovani, but during his second year (1951/1952) he switched to painting, where his mentor became Željko Hegedušić. It is worth mentioning that during this period of the early 1950s, many future prominent artists attended Zagreb Academy of Applied Arts, such as Zlatko Bourek, Jagoda Buić, Ante Sony Jakić, Zvonimir Lončarić, Mladen Pejaković, Ordan Petlevski and Pavao Štalter. After graduation, from 1955 to 1959 he attended the Master’s Workshop of professor Krsto Hegedušić.
This postgraduate study gave many talented young visual artists much needed freedom and opportunity to explore and use their artistic sensibility.

In 1959 he married Milena Matas, and they later had three sons. He spent most of the 1960 in the army, and upon returning to Zagreb he spent a year (1961–1962) as an art editor assistant in the magazine “Chemistry in industry”, which was the only full-time job he ever had. Since 1967, Vasko Lipovac lived and worked in Split, Croatia, where the Mediterranean climate inspired him to fulfill his poetic vision, and to create numerous works.
Four thematic units have been detected in the work of Lipovac, namely the Mediterranean, sports, the sacral and erotic.

He was intrigued by the idea of integrating art with architecture, and especially integration of art into workspace, so he collaborated with numerous architects. Among his most prominent are the collaborations with Jerko Rošin,