SANDRO KOPP: MEDIATED PRESENCE – SKYPE PORTRAITS AND ANIMAL COMPANIONS

SANDRO KOPP

Sandro Kopp was born in 1978 in Heidelberg, Germany, of New Zealand and German descent. He started drawing and painting proficiently at a very young age and had his first solo exhibition when he was seven years old, his second when he was fifteen. After graduating Abiltur majoring in Fine Art and English, Kopp moved to New Zealand in 2000. The following three years were spent studying, painting and exhibiting in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, where he lived in the creative collective, The Factory. Having left New Zealand in 2005, the next years where spent nomadically roaming around between Italy, New York, France and the UK. Since 2009 he has been based in the Highlands of Scotland. Kopp has exhibited internationally, most recently at the National Portrait Gallery, London in 2007; the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in 2008; at the Istancool arts festival, Istanbul, Turkey in May 2011 and at Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York in January 2012.

PRESS RELEASE

SANDRO KOPP “Mediated Presence – Skype portraits and Animal Companions”
October 11 – 17 , 2012
6 Fitzroy Square, London

ISTANBUL’74 presents “Mediated Presence – Skype portraits and Animal Companions”, an exhibition of new works by Sandro Kopp taking place during London Frieze Art Fair at 6 Fitzroy Square, London on view between October 11- 17, 2012.

ISTANBUL’74 first presented Kopp’s work during the Istanbul International Arts and Culture Festival – Istancool in May 2011. The exhibition titled “Being With You” featured Skype-sitting portraits with subjects such as Haider Ackerman, Tilda Swinton, Ryan McGinley, Waris Ahluwalia and many more. ISTANBUL’74 then presented Sandro Kopp’s second exhibition “There You Are” in January 2012 in New York at Lehmann Maupin’s Lower East Side gallery.

Sandro Kopp’s works covers a series of oil paintings executed in front of the computer during skype-video-conversations with friends and family, who sit for the entire duration of the painting.It is also an offering to human engagement; the continued existence of warmth and connection within new tecnologies of communication. Now a brand new exhibition by Sandro Kopp titled “Mediated Presence – Skype portraits and Animal Companions“ will be presented by ISTANBUL’74 during Frieze Art Fair in London. Sandro Kopp’s exhibition will again feature a series of portraits painted from the artist’s skype-sittings with friends who become his paintings’ subjects.

The artist says of his work:
“We all crave comfort.
We use mediations like Skype to bridge space, bringing dear ones close.
The soothingness of sharing everyday activity – even when half a planet apart.
The sharing of a portrait sitting- a couple of hours of acknowledgement of each others presence.

We transfer the spirit of comfort onto stuffed animal guardians and allow them to hold us. To travel with us. To substitute an intimate presence and receive the projections of our anthropomorphic feelings until they evolve their own gleanable spirit. We build memory and ever further remove it from the clear-cut parameters of experience.

As time passes we lie back on a nest of the past. A nest padded with an altered impressions of what was. We reach out to old friends
and make new friends. We look for heroes and inspirations to guide the way. All these manifestations of the search for comfort are the subject of this new body of paintings.”