....
The Jack Tilton Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Leo Copers: an installation consisting of paintings, gloves, vases, roses and nooses, that gives a cerebral and witty twist to the easy sentiments it first suggests. The opening reception will be on Wednesday, May 21 from 6 - 8 pm, and the exhibition will run through June 21.
Since the late sixties, Copers has been making art in a diverse range of materials, primarily sculptures and installations, and also a number of performance works. Present in many of the sculptures and installations is a sense of antithesis or duality. There is generally an absence of a clear subjective motivation, and the spectator undergoes a disorienting or shocking experience during the viewing process. His work combines the functional with the poetic, the mundane with the marvelous. He is adept at playing with the ambiguous and the contradictory. Wim van Mulders wrote in a catalog essay in 1988: “Coper’s objects do not coincide with the artist’s subjectivity. He does not feel forced to create and reveal a subjective conflict situation. Copers tends to see art as a possibility whereby ideology and propaganda, and their deceit, are used imperceptibly, to conjure and divine images and concepts.”
Since his last solo exhibition at Jack Tilton Gallery in 1991, Copers has exhibited extensively throughout Europe and had solo exhibitions in Milan, Brussels, Ghent and Munich. He has shown at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst in Ghent, the Bremen Kunstverein and Ikon Gallery in Birmingham. He has done guerrilla performances as a blind man with a cane at the Pompidou in Paris and the Kunsthalle Basel. This is his third solo exhibition at the Jack Tilton Gallery.
