Artist Interview | Alfred Freddy Krupa

How did you begin creating?

I was born into a family that belonged to what could be described as Yugoslav and Croatian cultural nobility (The term "cultural nobility" or "aristocracy of culture" is most prominently associated with the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, particularly in his seminal work, "Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste", originally published in French as La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement, 1979). My grandfather was an academic painter Alfred Krupa (1915-1989) a multinational Silesian by birth, former Krakow student.

On this place I must write something about him to give you context of my own life narrative. Alfred Joseph Kruppa, born in Mikołów, Poland, was a Polish-Croatian academic painter, athlete, and inventor. After studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, he was forcibly conscripted into the German army during the occupation of Poland. In 1943, he deserted the German army and joined the Partisan forces (National Liberation Movement) near Donji Lapac in occupied Yugoslavia (present-day Croatia). He became one of the key artistic figures of the Croatian anti-fascist movement. After the war, he settled in Karlovac, Croatia, where he worked as an art educator and became known for his realistic and plein-air paintings, particularly landscapes, cityscapes of Karlovac (its rivers and surrounding areas), and portraits. He is the inventor of the wheeled suitcase in the early 1950s and many other inventions. The Topusko 1944 Exhibition was a significant event in the life and career of my grandfather and a landmark moment for Croatian anti-fascist art during World War II. It was the first official art exhibition held on liberated territory in Croatia during World War II and represented the formal establishment and recognition of the visual arts within the Croatian anti-fascist movement (ZAVNOH's Cultural and Artistic Department). Krupa was one of the thirteen core artists (sometimes referred to as the "Trinaestorica slikara i kipara" or "Thirteen Painters and Sculptors") who exhibited their works. The group included prominent names who would become central to post-war Croatian art, such as Edo Murtić, Zlatko Prica, Vanja Radauš, and Marijan Detoni.

So I literally grew up with the smells of paints and turpentine, hand-painting and cutting out passepartout, attending art gatherings (there are basically none of those these days), conversations with journalists and customers. I watched him portray people who came to the apartment, the household, me. I watched him in the field, in the open air. Constantly at some exhibitions. And all of that entered me. It became part of the fundamental external influences (phenotype), but there was certainly also the genotype in the winning combination. 

I was his disciple not regular student.

We could still say a lot about that.

What is your preferred medium, and why?

Ink. From the very beginning. Although of course I studied a lot of things, earlier with my grandfather and later at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of Zagreb. Why? Well, because of that directness, spontaneity, immediacy. It is a technique that requires, if you want to be an artist in the narrow sense of the word and its master, both complete awareness/focus and (paradoxically but truly) a mind in a state of automatic drawing. As a result, you have an original painting of ideas and emotions, of the conscious and unconscious mind. That is why my works are to a significant extent both descriptive and abstract at the same time. You either have that in you or you don't. There is no tutorial, no prescribed method that you memorize and now you have "like learned something".

Where do you draw your inspiration from?

From life. Past and present. From the environment. From external stimuli, awareness of the environment, people and events. Sometimes it is pure pleasure in the line, the stain, the symmetry/asymmetry: more precisely in the feedback that comes from the realization and recognition of what is called "one's own expression, one's own line, one's own record of a nerve impulse"

Is there a political or activist dimension to your art? Do you create with the intention of conveying a message?

Of course. For a very long time. You can recognize my attitude, my position in everything. However, it is not vulgarly obvious, it is not based on a shallow effect, on an artistic language for “simple minds”. There is always some message, a multi-layeredness. I strive for a reduction in the expression and materiality of the work, but without taking away its ambiguity in the realized work. It certainly affects its saleability, because people like to consume without effort. That is clear to me and I am not judging, but I do not want to be in that temporarily financially interesting group of “artists”. I do not want my work to be a narrative illustration (that is certainly a very interesting category for me, which I respect as such) but to speak about my inner self in a different “painterly” way, through let’s call it a “deeper evocative form”.

Do you create in order to leave a trace — a testimony of your time?

Yes. I think everyone wants that. If they are actually honest with themselves. Here, I sometimes come across some work that I drew and painted at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s (before and during the war) and I am very glad that they have been preserved. I can feel the spirit of the times. I see how I drew lines, arranged them in a format, chose motifs and then I feel myself as I was when I was 19 or 20 years old, I remember my interests, desires, hopes, surroundings, people, smells, sounds, events, a whole life in its fullness that has disappeared forever, unknown to most of humanity. Those little pictures, although often with obvious technical clumsiness and naivety, become fragments of a lost time. Today I am looking for all my old works. For example, in the 1990s I painted a whole series of plein air watercolors that I considered an achievement in that field then and today. But they are hard to find. People do not respond to public invitations. It's the same with the "newer" works. They all tell a story about me and my time, my perspective and a slice in the holographic universe (that idea doesn't seem impossible to me and has logic).

How would you define your style or aesthetic? Do you see yourself as part of a current artistic movement?

This has been discussed by various art critics for years. And I myself have written some articles on the subject. I highlight "Sumi-e from the Perspective of a Traditional Academically-trained European Artist" (23rd April 2013, the Tokyo-based online magazine Beyond Calligraphy). My first written formulation on the subject is the New Ink Art Manifest from 1996. The original document, manuscript is in the archives (Aktenarchiv) of the famous contemporary art exhibition "documenta" in Kassel, Germany (the access number docA-97). I reinterpret Western modernism in the form of the Far East ink art, in practice realized as the genuine ultra-personal amalgamated form based on Expressionism, Art Informel, Minimalism, plein air work, Abstract Art (etc.) with a typically East Asian approach.

What is the relationship between your art and intimacy?

There is a direct connection. Eros and Pornos have always been in my work. Not just in the realm of aesthetic. I have never understood why people continue to accept the moral-immoral/right-wrong dimension in relation to the naked body and sex. These are the most powerful levels of existence, the basic natural levels and the highest levels of personal sophistication at the same time. Freud was clear on this issue. Sexual energy is creative energy in all forms, not just animal like reproduction. The biggest culprits for widespread distorted attitudes are religions as such (not only formalized, organized ones, but also archaic ones), and human mental weakness (by weakness I mean the inability to make correct decisions regarding issues of intimacy and sexuality). And you will find a position on this topic in my work, too. What is wrong is coercion in any form, violence, aggression, that is a directly related but still different topic.

Are there other artists who inspire you?

Alfred Krupa Sr., Sesshu, Hokusai, Schiele, Mondrian, Rembrandt, Whistler, Turner and the army of others from various centuries and styles.

Do you have any current projects we should be following?

Of course! In the first week of December 2025 opens my solo show „Krupa's Way“ in the CICA Museum in South Korea.

But for the rest..well…in order to find it what it is just type my name in Google once a while during next year (2026) and you will learn how the story unfolds! Allow me to be a bit mysterious this time (between us not my favorite state)!