Evgen Čopi Gorišek

Evgen Čopi Gorišek (b.1994) is an emerging painter of contemporary faux naïf. His paintings deal with figurative forms of expression rendered in the attributes of graffiti and arranged in a child-like pattern. The colour-intensive compositions create a close association with ordinary topics and mass culture. Characters that are smeared with blurred facial features are his most frequent and recognisable representations. The viewer can barely identify their masculine or feminine features or it seems rather pointless to examine the matter of their agender identities. These genderless depictions- as well as other more random ones like a Ferrari diver, a tiger, a basketball player, pussy cats, or bodybuilders- synthesise a compilation of his typical motifs. As he highlights himself, his inspiration comes from “random things that he watches on his phone or just random absurd situation that he gets into while he’s walking around the city. Many times everyday city life situations combined with current feelings”.
This imagery of human figures and objects, which tends to look 3D on the painting’s surface, flirts with more ordinary conditions that have been re-examined by this young artist. Such subjects are creatively presented based on the artist’s underlying intimate conceptions, testifying a joyful airbrushed interplay with Gorisek’s personal desires and preferences. Strikingly made with spray paint and washes of oil sticks or acrylics, Gorisek’s body of work manages to radiate frisky contradictions and disparate content. The artist’s spray techniques bring up further possibilities of light-hearted occurrences that offer a funny atmosphere and lively effect on the final result.
Blending various motifs, the Berlin-based painter starts to experiment images of ambiguity and spontaneity in his visuals through a wide spectrum of vivid colours. His compositions aesthetically balance contradictory approaches creating amusing but also absurd works for the viewers. On one hand, his depictions incorporate familiarity and attachment converting a more comprehensive iconography based on still life paintings which simply showcase tigers, rainbows, cars and motor bikes.
Evgen Čopi Gorišek (b. 1994, Koper, Slovenia) works between Slovenia and Bassano del Grappa. He began studying sculpture in Slovenia and left before finishing, self taught as a painter, bringing with him a background in graffiti and a long interest in fashion. He paints in spray, oil stick and acrylic, in saturated colour, building figures whose bodies and settings are carefully rendered while the faces are smeared into a few blurred lines, unreadable and often ungendered. The subjects come from ordinary looking: tennis players, bodybuilders, tigers, cars, cats, things half seen on a phone or on a walk through the city.

Solo exhibitions include Match Point at König Galerie, Berlin (2023), Paradise Lost and Found at Woaw Gallery, Hong Kong, and Everywhere, Everywhen in Venice, curated by Saša Bogojev with DUVE Berlin. His work has been included in institutional group exhibitions at UGM Maribor, at Museum MORE in the Netherlands and at the Mazovian Centre for Contemporary Art Elektrownia in Poland, and he has held a residency at Collectum x Nobu in Los Cabos, Mexico. His paintings are in the collections of the Aurora Museum in Shanghai, the X Museum in Beijing, the Lian Foundation in Geneva and the Pizzuti Collection at the Columbus Museum of Art.

Gorišek has worked with Plan X since 2020, with exhibitions in Milan and Capri including Cut, Copy, Paste (2020), Only Loners Left Alive (2020), Dolce Vita (2021) and Cemento (2022), alongside presentations at Untitled Art Miami Beach in 2020 and 2022, at Contemporary Art Now Ibiza in 2023 and at Art Dubai in 2024.