As he opens his first solo exhibition at home in more than a decade, painter Sandro Kopp talks about the emotions driving his latest work and what it’s like to whip up a faux oeuvre for a Wes Anderson film.
Sandro Kopp wants his art to exist as an antidote to death. Waving his hands in elaborate gestures as if painting a canvas, the Kiwi-German painter thinks art should nourish a viewer in the same way as “food, music and movement’' do.
The 45-year-old painter has been thinking about mortality and death a lot since last year when his now-80-year-old mother, Kayla, first became ill. He’s back in New Zealand tired, jetlagged and emotional after two months in the Scottish Highlands, where he lives with his long-time partner, Academy Award-winning actor Tilda Swinton and their two dogs.
Kopp – known for his colourful abstract paintings and figurative portraits, along with small portraits of the human eye – is holding his first New Zealand exhibition since 2011. GalaXcells is on show at Dunedin’s Milford Galleries, and the artist describes it as his most complete show to date.
Since he began working full-time as an artist in the mid-2000s, Kopp has exhibited extensively internationally with his experimental approaches to figurative painting.
On this trip to open his exhibition, he has paused in Wellington to visit his sister and mother, who he hasn’t seen for two months; in that time her health has worsened.
Kopp talks to the Listener about the emotions many adult children feel as they watch an elderly parent quickly deteriorate. He scrolls through his phone to show a portrait he painted on a palette of his mother’s eye (eye paintings are something of a Kopp signature). This one shows the translucent, wrinkled skin around it and, in her iris, the reflections of the house she lived in on Waiheke Island, which he regularly visited. He turns emotional: “I was with her just now before I came here to meet you and it’s so pinching.’’
He clasps his forearm above the gold ring on his wedding finger. “It’s so pinching to feel the breadth of time and the fact life is so limited.’’
Art has been his solace. Last year, he returned to New Zealand when his mother was admitted to hospital. She slept in a windowless hospital room. Around this time, he says, he was questioning his work: did he still want to paint? Was it still what he should do? He was drawn to three prints along the hospital corridor, which he went and stood in front of every few hours when he needed to feel comforted.
He breaks down, wiping away tears. “I just thought if anything that I make could give someone else this sense of nourishment and meaningfulness, that’s the best thing to hope for. “Living as entropy- and mortality-adjacent as I am at the moment, the simplicity of making something that endures, something that stays around and something that will just give someone something nice to look at becomes so important.
“So my hope is that I make this thing – just the thing that I want to look at – and someone else might want to look at that, too, and it might have meaning for them.’’
Two of the works in the show – Momentum and Anthropomorphosis – will be difficult for him to part with because he began painting them when he was most emotional.
“Look at them,’’ he says, scrolling through his phone. “They show this sensual clinging to life and colour, colour, colour. It’s really hard to sell them because they feel so personal.’’
Another one has been kept out because it feels too precious, something he has never done before. “It always feels immoral to paint something and then just keep it.’’
The exhibition works range in price from $3000-$15,000. When he arrived in Wellington the day before being interviewed, Kopp bought a canvas. He hasn’t painted on it yet but he talks about art as a vehicle to help him process his emotions. “I have no idea how people who don’t paint deal with difficult situations in life.’’
Early on, Kopp became known for painting portraits of well-known people. Among them have been Wes Anderson, Frances McDormand, John Waters, Willem Dafoe, Michael Stipe and, yes, Swinton. But he doesn’t want to talk too much about the woman he calls “my sweetheart’'. You get the sense he really wants to be valued for his art, not because he is the partner of someone more famous than he is.
These days, he’s not particularly interested in portraits but is instead drawn to abstracts, though a portrait featuring the hair of its subject mixed into the paint, Dave all round, was a finalist in the 2020 Adam Portraiture Award in New Zealand.
The eye paintings are like mini-portraits. He travels a lot so they’re also practical to create: in one exhibition, beside the Venice Biennale in 2019, he exhibited 116 of them.
“The eyes are a great in-between thing because they are a portrait but they also leave open many questions. A portrait almost answers too many questions, it’s all out there, whereas with an eye you’re just immediately wondering, oh, what does the rest of the face look like? What’s the reflection in the [iris]? They have this mystery and I really love the almost jewel-like quality that eyes have. That’s why I’ve done so many of them.’’
GalaXcells includes six self-portraits of his eye painted on used, colourful paint palettes. He’s fascinated by the naked human form, the undersea world (when in Wellington, he snorkels at Mākara and Red Rocks) and space photography.
His artist statement for GalaXcells says he is “looking for alien structures in the familiar forms of bodies and for universal rhythms in landscapes, animals, plants, sea creatures, galaxies, and then morphing them into a symphony of shapes and colours, layering time, space and meaning until they each resonate with an atmosphere of their very own.”
Kopp grew up in Heidelberg, Germany, with his Kiwi mother and German father, who split up during his childhood. He wasn’t academic and, as a 115kg 15-year-old, couldn’t play sport. But he could draw from when he first picked up a pencil. He moved to New Zealand aged 22, picking fruit in Nelson then attending art school in Lower Hutt at the Learning Connexion – the only formal art training he has had. He flatted in a large house and creative space in Mt Victoria famously known as The Factory in the early 2000s. Taika Waititi was a later resident. “You stayed until you were asked to pay rent one day.”
Kopp got a job as an extra on The Lord of the Rings. He was then front half of a centaur in Narnia film The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where he met Swinton – 18 years his senior – who played the White Witch. Two years later, in 2006, he moved to Scotland to live with her and her children and now divides his time between their home in Nairn, on the northeast coast, travel for his and Swinton’s work and seeing family in New Zealand.
His film connections merged with his art when he was commissioned by Wes Anderson to create 10 monumental paintings for 2021 film The French Dispatch, which stars Swinton among many others. Kopp had three months to paint the works of imprisoned, criminally insane artist character Moses Rosenthaler, who becomes a sensation in the art world.
Kopp’s eye portraits include one of Benicio Del Toro, who plays Rosenthaler, and Léa Seydoux, who plays a prison guard and the artist’s muse. Along with the film’s audiences, they were seen by 40,000 people at a London exhibition. “They are extremely substantial pieces of work and if that’s the one thing that remains, I’ll be really happy with that. That’s basically the only question that matters as a painter: if you’re dead and this is the one thing that represents you to the world after you, are you okay with that?
“I can definitely say that about my mum’s eye painting, and I can say that about those paintings in the film.’’
GalaXcells, Milford Galleries Dunedin, to April 11.