Matija Čop
Work
In the meantime
The site-specific installation In the meantime is created in dialogue between earlier works in soft sculpture and new explorations with steel armatures.
The resulting membranes are soft, supple and pliable, bending in all directions, allowing for stretching and wrinkling. Penetrated by and merging with steel, their forms are disrupted, suggesting uncontrolled and unpredictable metamorphoses.
The installation transforms the Bačva gallery in a radical gesture of both synchronisation and tension with its circular architecture. A central suspended object, a weightless blue vertical, hovers in direct communication with the hybrid semicircular structure below. Horizontal, vertical and diagonal breaks in the empty space rhythmise the possible multiple views of the exposed naked objects. The exaggeratedly smooth, shiny and somewhat menacing steel constructions reflect and absorb captured movements and glances.
Series 21
A series of suspended soft sculptures translate personal sound recordings into three-dimensional columnar forms utilising Čop’s signature interlocking technique.
Sound fragments from intimate exchanges between the artist and his partner - spoken words and unspoken sounds of physical presence - are used to produce visual waveforms showing sonic relationships between frequency, amplitude, timbre, and duration. These waveforms produce the compositional elements of each work.
Totemic and monumental, yet fragile and hollow, the works of Series 21 reverberate with the impossibility of rendering concretely that which was ephemeral.
Meanwhile
Layers of cut paper are meticulously hand painted and arranged to produce abstracted fields suggestive of infinite grid structures.
Unit shapes are selected as byproducts of the artist’s soft sculpture practice and removed from paper in endlessly tessellating configurations. The resultant “skeleton” sheets invert the usual relationship between figure and ground, and are honoured by the artist as valuable systems in their own right.
These works draw out, through an intentionally automatic and impersonal method, the visual potentials of interacting repetitious structures. Novel sensations are presented of order and chaos, surface and depth.
Alterations
A series of ten metal-cut relief prints explore the notion of self-portraiture within the artist’s idiosyncratic systems.
A three-dimensional scan of Čop’s own face is selectively fragmented and then digitally deconstructed into a series of two-dimensional patterns. These patterns are equivalent to those used by the artist in his soft sculpture practice, necessarily entailing the potential for (re)construction into a three-dimensional object.
The uncomfortable and often obsessive interface with one’s own image is reduced to analysis through a cold, anthropometric lens. In presenting the face as ready, bare data positioned between de- and re-construction, a suggestion of intervention arises: an opportunity for modification, improvement, or correction.
Untitled
Beginning with a template of a simple cuboid, the artist devises new and interrelating forms through simple geometric interventions. Cast into moulded concrete, these forms provoke intuitive responses of connection and relation.
Čop positions this act of form-creation and recombination as a metaphor for the primordial origins of language. Relations and symbols arise from common, rudimentary materials, and potentials emerge for increasingly complex structures and dynamic syntaxes.
About
Matija Čop (b 1987) is an artist living in London. His work encompasses sculpture, painting, and printmaking.
Čop’s practice explores the transformative potential of “translation” as ideas, structures, and their component materials pass between encapsulating frameworks.
Čop’s visual language constructs itself from selected unit elements which are iteratively combined, reconfigured, and dissolved in accordance with self-contrived, project-specific logics. The resultant works invite reflection on tensions between order/disorder, manufacture/craft, and unit/system.
Čop completed his MA at the Royal College of Art, London, in 2017. His work is held in the permanent collection of the National Museum of Modern Art at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Museum of Arts and Crafts, Zagreb. He exhibited at the Textile Art Biennial 2021 in Kranj, the 48th Zagreb Salon, and Eccentrico Musivo in Ravenna. He is also a lecturer at the Royal College of Art and Harvard University.
Contact
Exhibitions