Drago Tršar was born in Planina, Slovenia in 1927. From a young age, Tršar exhibited a talent for painting and drawing, and practised both disciplines throughout his youth. In 1943, his family moved to Ljubljana, where he enrolled in a local private art school run by France Gorše. There, he began studying sculpture and practised in the workshop of sculptor Boris Kalin. As his proficiency grew, sculpture fully replaced drawing and painting as Tršar’s main medium of expression.
After mandatory military service, Tršar, by then a committed sculptor, enrolled at the newly established Academy of Fine Arts and Design in 1947. He studied under Professor Peter Loboda and graduated in 1951. Following graduation, he continued his specialisation in sculpture under Professor Frančišek Smerdu. Later, Tršar started his teaching career as a teaching assistant at his alma mater in 1960, and became a full professor at the Academy in 1976.
Tršar’s first public exhibition was mounted in 1953, alongside the members of Group 53. The collective’s ambition was to shake up the status quo of Slovenian art at the time. Tršar applied himself to the exploration of novel possibilities for figural solutions within modern sculpting. Even early on, the corporal sensitivity for which Tršar is now well known, shone through.
His initial areas of focus centred around anthropomorphism relating to both human and animal figures. Aesthetically, he has had a definitive emphasis on mass and monumentality. He has combined all these elements into sculpted cycles, such as Stara mesta, Svetovi, Človek v času in prostoru, Manifestanti I. One of Tršar’s signatures, however, is the erotic nature of some of his work, which has constituted a dedicated chapter of his corpus. Never vulgar, the sensuality is energetic, and highlights the electricity contained in dramatically intimate moments shared between bodies, when skin and other body parts connect.
His exhibitions have included: Exposition internationale de la sculpture contemporaine, organised by the Musée Rodin, Paris (1956); the 29th Venice Biennale (1959); Documenta II Kunst nach 1945, Kassel, Germany (1959); the 5th Biennial Open Exhibition, Middelheim Park, Antwerp, Belgium (1967); Sculpture from Twenty Nations, the Solomon. R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1967); the monumental L’Art en Yougoslavie de la préhistoire à nos jours, Grand Palais, Paris (1971); and Europa, Europa: A Century Avant-Garde in Central and Eastern Europe, Bonn, Germany (1994).
Throughout his career, he has received numerous awards: First Prize at the First Mediterranean Biennial, Alexandria, Egypt (1955); First Prize at the Triennial of Fine Arts, Belgrade (1961); the Prešeren Foundation Award (1968); First Prize at the Second Exhibition of Yugoslav Portrait, Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina (1971); the Jakopič Award (1972); an award at the Formes Humaines Exhibition, Paris (1982); First Prize at the International Jewellery Exhibition, Celje, Slovenia (1989); and the Prešeren Award for Lifetime Achievement(1990).
