After finishing his studies at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, he became a postgraduate student at the studio of Josef Kaplický, where he worked from 1958 to 1961, and then became a freelance artist.

He won a gold medal for his glass mosaic for the Expo 58 in Brussels (together with the artists Adriena Šimotová and František Burant).

In 1990, at the request of students, he returned to the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, was appointed professor in 1992 and remained there as head of the glass studio until 2008.

Kopecký's school at the UMPRUM, from which a number of prominent personalities came,[5] followed Kaplický in promoting the general education of students, but consciously went against the "cultivation of glass" and placed more emphasis on the strength of expression.

Already his early glass realizations in the form of thin-walled vessels bear abstract painterly compositions that enter the "third dimension" through transparencies (Vase, 1958).

The line of objects made of ordered flat glass interlaced with coloured foil or sandblasted,[12] which he created from the 1970s onwards, is based on the principle of multiplied constructions and shapes (Planks, 1976).

The object is a synthesis of creative endeavours and belongs to the highlights of Kopecký's work, but after the exhibition it was destroyed and preserved only in photographs.

[20] Kopecký deprived glass of its tendency towards primary attractiveness by brutal intervention of colour, destruction and combination with other materials such as wood, cardboard and metal (Search, Space 3 event, Všemín 1986) In the installation in the Prague Castle Ballroom in 1999, where black colour dominated, evoking feelings of frustration and loneliness, the dangerous and hurtful sharp edges of the glass stood out from the black mass.

They act as a counterpoint to his expressionist works, but develop the same human themes of spatial infinity, silence, anxiety and melancholy.

[9] From a methodically disciplined, geometrically spare or mysteriously veiled position of dehumanized constructions and buildings (Street, 1970, Labyrinth, 1979), he moves to expressive eruptions of colour and animality, to the destruction of the material and the disruption of the viewer's certainty about the notion of beauty.

[23] The sadness, skepticism, embarrassment and despair that drove his work in the Normalization 1970s.,[24] led to the necessity to control emotions with reason and to create a firm order in the image[25] In paintings from the late 1960s and 1970s, the artist often chose patterned linoleum as a ground (Three Pillars, 1968).

The linoleum became the basis for a set of tachistic paintings of interior landscapes from the late 1970s and 1980s,[13] but the predominant motifs are of prepared segments of buildings, structures and objects.

Colours are applied to the canvas in massive layers, dripping, and are disrupted by the intervention of various tools (Suburbs, 2001, Thousands of Wings, 2010).

[27] The artist is a rare solitaire in this field, his work providing an opportunity to authentically experience the fascination of unrestrained energy.

Precise linear structures repeat motifs of paintings with constructions in a more artificial and flat form, but there are also apparently intoxicating games with the machine-precise multiplication of rounded lines and their optical illusions (Very Pleasant Shape, 2014).

The success of his monumental composition at Expo 92 in Seville, in which he used tons of plate glass and literally hectolitres of colour in wild textures and eruptions,[29] testifies to the fact that the fascination with the emotional experience of the unrestrained creation is a language that is completely understandable internationally.

Since 1994, he has also presented his elemental and spontaneous artistic expression through performances,[30][31] in which, accompanied by music (Ravel,[32] Mussorgsky) uses hot cast glass and buckets of acrylic paints[33] and becomes not only the creator but also the subject of the creative process.

When I look at a picture painted by me and see something completely incomprehensible, which I not only do not understand, I cannot explain, I am startled by it and I even sense a kind of threat, only then does a powerful experience appear to me, not yet clouded by the mud of interpretation and conventionality.

My point is that the finished thing made of glass should give a deeper meaning to the observer and not merely speak by the properties of the material, which, though unique, are not enough for me to build on.