ABOUT

Born in Slovenia, Evgen Čopi Gorišek (b. 1994) is currently based in Slovenia. Never receiving a formal art education, he decided to pursue art as a career after visiting an exhibition by pop art masters while living in Slovenia. Taken by the two-dimensional compositions of the genre, its powerful colors, and the compelling messages conveyed by popular imagery, he began developing his own artistic approach. Reflecting his focus on portrait art, his images have faces that lack three-dimensionality and features rendered unclear in simple lines like the scrawling of a child. In contrast, the figures’ arms and legs are depicted concretely and three-dimensionally, along with the clothing and accessories they wear as well as their bags, and backgrounds that they occupy. This contrast with the representation of faces evokes an ironic quality. The most prominent characteristic of the artist’s portrait images is the fact that the figures in his different paintings all show similar smiles. Yet as viewers look at those uniform smiles, they cannot gauge the internal depth or sincerity. This is effectively symbolic of contemporary society and its lack of true communication, while the sleek surfaces —created with oil sticks and acrylics-draw analogies with the culture of social media images, in which no blemishes are allowed. This way, Čopi Gorišek shows figures sporting the same smiles against sleek surfaces, presenting a new form of pop art that captures issues drifting through the contemporary era.