Take Time

Eric Dupont gallery is pleased to present Take Time, a personal exhibition of Sandro Kopp.

Kopp is of New Zealand descent but grew up in Germany and is now based in the Highlands of Scotland. For this exhibition he continues his exploration of the possibilities and boundaries of portrait painting. For his last few exhibitions Kopp has been painting people via Skype conversations, looking at the concept of mediated presence and examining at the meeting points of classical painting and digital technology. This is his first entirely video-chat-free show since 2008. All portraits in this exhibition are based on one live sitting with friends and family members, lasting between two and six hours.

The encrusting oil paint on the central paintings of the show - Take Time I, II and III - are several years' worth of palette-scrapings, slowly built up, collecting time, like a coral reef. Each blob is the trace of a particular day or two of painting. The portrait is then painted in the centre which is left more or less clean and flat. After the sitting, the image is built up over months, refined in dozens of layers and then surrounded by precious metals like gold, palladium and platinum. Some of the palettes that were scraped clean to provide these 'reefs' of paint are exhibited alongside, carrying self-portraits. Accompanying these pieces is The New You - a series that was begun in 2003. These paintings were made without using photography as an aide memoire.

Each subject is a friend or family member of the artist, mainly inhabitants of The Factory - a communal flat and hub of creative life in Wellington, New Zealand - where Kopp lived at the time. The sitters are painted without clothes, props or background, allowing the representations to be free from anything that would link them to their societal context, or to the specific trappings of the moment in history they inhabit. The title refers to how these paintings become a "new you", a collaborative entity that
exists between painter and sitter: they are of the sitter, yet entirely made by the artist, "filtered" through his perception and the limitations of technique and material.
Kopp’s work has been exhibited at Lehmann Maupin, New York; Victoria Miro Gallery, London; The National Portrait Gallery, London and other galleries in Europe, America and New Zealand.

The current show is accompanied by a catalogue text by Denise Wendel Poray, who also curated the exhibition.