“It's all Sandro. Abstract Expressionist, French Modernist, a taste of Tribeca before the real estate prices went up – he invented his own personal genre for us; boldest brushstrokes, blasting colour, a dazzling and wonderful sequence of images which transformed our film and evolved further into the work shown in this thrilling new exhibition.”¹

“By using the contemporary technology of video-chat in the live sittings Kopp goes beyond painting purely from the physical presence and moves on to exhibiting a situation of communication. In contrast to painting from photography, Kopp paints not only one moment but several moments from a moving image… His paintings are condensing time and layering it onto a canvas… Rather than of immutability, his paintings are mirrors of incessant change.”²

Painting explicitly referencing - and departing from - the classic figurative traditions of painting and drawing comprises the central ground of all Kopp’s works, with the “human being… at the centre… the occasion and starting point even when, as in the Rosenthaler Suite, he successively dissolves the figures created as nudes into released paint, into pasty relief-like bodies of colour, all the way to total abstraction.”³

“The virtuosity of the fine line work in his polymorphic nudes and the graphic interweaving of body contours merge into visual searching games. These are body landscapes that should not only be looked at, but in which the eye must be immersed.”⁴

“…eyes are barometers, signal lights for feelings held within… The eyes of Sandro Kopp are accumulations of highly specific but anonymous intimacy… Like a star in the night sky, the human eye has something inherently indefinable to it, a sense of infinite depth… unfathomable complexity.” 

Sandro Kopp, born in 1978, is of German and New Zealand descent. He has been residing in Scotland since 2006. Kopp attended art school in Wellington and makes frequent return trips to New Zealand each year. He has exhibited extensively in New York, Milan, Paris, London, Berlin, Vienna, Edinburgh, Istanbul, and elsewhere.

His work has been the subject of major feature articles in publications such as Elephant, Monopol, Dazed Digital, and the New York Times, among others. Kopp has also delivered talks at prestigious institutions like the New York Academy of Fine Arts and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

In 2021, his work received significant acclaim when featured in Wes Anderson’s film "The French Dispatch." Additionally, a notable institutional survey exhibition of his work took place at Mannheimer Kunstverein in Germany in 2022, accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue. Kopp's artwork is represented in prominent private and corporate collections worldwide.