John Copeland: Heavy Reverb

About

John Copeland’s work is characterised by expressive mark making; thick, impasto oils, and heavily wrought scenes where exuberant brush strokes disrupt and distort the narrative. Using found photos and print media as a starting point, Copeland appropriates and transforms his chosen imagery, using a erce intensity of mark making to create complex compositions that hint at insidious, visceral drives amongst otherwise ordinary tableaux.

Copeland’s work continues a postmodernist project of interrogating an increasing distance between sur- face and substance, routine and the existential state of being. Whilst Copeland’s work has always trod heavy psychological stomping ground: the death drive, media and the art world, parties and play, spec- tatorship, and the psyche, Heavy Reverb is Copeland’s most ideologically incisive to date, ne tuned over the pandemic months: ‘These works are the result of a merciless period of trying to get to the heart of it. Trying to recalibrate the balance, while at the same time ending up somewhere new’.

Born in California in 1976, John Copeland studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts, where he gained a BFA in 1998. Copeland’s work has been exhibited internationally in Copen- hagen, Bologna, Zurich, New York, Leipzig and most recently at the Newport Street Gallery in London. He lives and works in New York.