Evgen Čopi Gorišek
Aspirational portraits of the digital age
“Most people in our society – and even I am like this sometimes – find it hard to tell the truth.”
Evgen Čopi Gorišek's paintings capture life in the digital age. He creates luxurious scenes of people wrapped in designer clothes, and paints people as if they are always posing for a photo. Despite their glamour, their faces tell a different story. They have an uneasy grimace, disconnecting them from their surroundings. By using an airbrush, Čopi Gorišek gives the figures a photorealistic quality. The backgrounds are then filled in with oil sticks, creating smooth, flat colour. Airbrush artists Austin Lee and Madsaki inspired him to take up the medium, while fashion photography strongly influ...
Evgen Čopi Gorišek's paintings capture life in the digital age. He creates luxurious scenes of people wrapped in designer clothes, and paints people as if they are always posing for a photo. Despite their glamour, their faces tell a different story. They have an uneasy grimace, disconnecting them from their surroundings. By using an airbrush, Čopi Gorišek gives the figures a photorealistic quality. The backgrounds are then filled in with oil sticks, creating smooth, flat colour. Airbrush artists Austin Lee and Madsaki inspired him to take up the medium, while fashion photography strongly influences his staged compositions.
Above all, the paintings poke fun at our obsession with self-improvement. He adopts the visual language of consumer culture, but subverts it in a faux-naif, or false-naive, style. ITaking inspiration from the lifestyle and self-improvement images on social media, Gorišek uses sunbathers and bodybuilders as examples of the modified body. He exposes this drive for perfection as futile, and laughs at all things aspirational.
Evgen Čopi Gorišek was born in 1994 in Slovenia. He now lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
Evgen Čopi Gorišek moved to Berlin spontaneously 2019. Within a couple of months, he bought an airbrush kit and got to work. He’s since exhibited in several international shows.
Fans of his work include Takashi Murakami and the late Virgil Abloh. He posed for a photo with Gorišek’s The secret to success (2022) during the König Galerie’s The Artist is Online exhibition.
