Artist Database

Klopcanovs was born in 1912 in Tashkent, the capital city of present-day Uzbekistan. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Riga, Latvia, and the Royal Academy of Arts in Stockholm. Klopcanovs joined the Linnware Ceramic Studio in South Africa in 1948. Later that year he and his wife Elma Vestman left Linnware and set up the Kalahari Studio in Bramley, Johannesburg. In July 1950, the couple relocated the studio to Cape Town. Despite his involvement with the ceramic studio, Klopcanovs’s primary interest was oil painting and he participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in South Africa between 1961 and 1973. During this period, he sold paintings in Sweden and the United States. Two of Klopcanovs's paintings are in the Museum of Modem Art (MOMA), USA. His oil paintings of the 1950s and 1960s are primarily figurative, although landscape was also an interest.