Vladimír Kopecký

Vladimír Kopecký was born on 26 November 1931 in Svojanov to a seamstress and a carpenter. From 1934 he lived with his parents and brother in Uhříněves. He wanted to become a painter from the age of five, but at the end of the Second World War the family moved to Děčín, and the nearest secondary art school was the State Vocational Glass School in Kamenický Šenov. He began there in 1946 under René Roubíček and Josef Khýn, and in 1948 and 1949 continued at the State Industrial Glass School in Nový Bor, where Stanislav Libenský taught him.

From 1949 to 1956 he studied in the studio of monumental painting and glass at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague under Josef Kaplický. In 1952, during a placement at Lednické Rovne in Slovakia, a grinding wheel broke while he was grinding glass and struck him in the face. He survived and underwent more than 20 plastic surgeries.

After postgraduate work in Kaplický's studio from 1958 to 1961, Kopecký became a freelance artist. He took part in the Milan Triennial (1957), the Czechoslovak glass show in Moscow (1959) and the world exhibitions in Brussels (1958), Montreal (1967) and Seville (1992). With Adriena Šimotová and František Burant he won a gold medal at Expo 58 for a glass mosaic. Between 1957 and 1967 he made monumental stained glass windows with Josef Jiřička's Art Glass Works. In the 1960s and 1970s he worked mainly as a painter, and until the end of the 1980s he designed glass objects for architecture.

His work combined a painter's foundation with an unconventional use of glass. From the early 1960s he used painting to deny the optical qualities of the material, setting gesture and boldness against its decorative appeal, and his so called ugly glass shocked his contemporaries. He moved between geometric order and gestural painting, guided by intuition.

In 1990, at his students' request, he returned to UMPRUM, was appointed professor in 1992 and headed the glass studio until 2008, with Marian Volráb as his assistant. He kept the studio free of creative restrictions and stressed general education and strength of expression rather than the cultivation of glass. From 1991 he belonged to the art group Other Geometry and from 1992 to the renewed Umělecká beseda.

Kopecký's first wife was the graphic artist Alena Kučerová. He lived in Prague with his second wife, Eva Kroftová, and worked in studios in Prague, in Central Bohemia and near Karlovy Vary.

Vladimír Kopecký died on Thursday 8 October 2026, aged 94. His wife, Eva Kroftová, announced his death on 9 October, and it was reported by the Czech News Agency (ČTK) and carried by Czech Television, Deník N, iDNES, Novinky and Blesk. The cause of death was not made public.

Kopecký won international recognition and contributed to the development of modern Czech glass art. His teaching at UMPRUM produced a number of prominent artists, and his expressive, painterly approach to glass broke with the material's decorative tradition. In 2021 he entered the Hall of Fame of the International Glass Symposium in Nový Bor.