The first American retrospective of the photographer John Coplans opens at the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center on October 29. John Coplans: A Self—Portrait coincides with the inauguration of P.S.1’s new 125,000-square foot art center, which has recently undergone an extensive expansion and renovation making it one of the largest facilities for contemporary art in the world.
John Coplans: A Self—Portrait includes over 60 black—and—white photographs, representing all phases of his self—portrait photography, including ten new works created specifically for the exhibition. The monumental, multi-panel compositions (many of which are over 46” x 54”) are intimate portrayals of the artist’s own body, a male body that is neither youthful nor airbrushed, and range from studies of Coplans’ weathered feet and hands to his torso, back and reclining figure. The immense size of the images transforms his aging body into a human “landscape” as it documents pores, wrinkles, hairs, and scabs in exacting detail.
In his self—portraits Coplans uses scale, depth of field and extreme cropping to render his body abstract and to enhance its symbolic qualities, enacting a sort of theater. The resulting emotional complexity of these works is poignant, outrageous, gentle and timeless in its simplicity. Alanna Heiss, executive director of the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center stated, “This exhibition has no formal curator for the simple reason that the term is in this case irrelevant. Coplans, a true Renaissance man, has edited books and art magazines and has curated and installed some of the most beautiful exhibitions in the world. For the past sixteen years he has been a fanatical full-time photographer, compressing the ideas of a lifetime into an increasingly demanding time schedule. This exhibition records his monumental and multiple achievements.”
Coplans began photographing his full, naked body in 1984 and only later focused on studies of his hands and feet. His most recent work again involves his full figure, as well as isolated parts of his upper and lower back. In the past two decades, other photographers have treated their own bodies as subjects for their work, but frequently with the aid of manipulated lighting effects, mise-en-scene or distancing. Coplans is the only contemporary photographer to have repeatedly made his unaltered body the sole subject of his work.
Born in London in 1920, Coplans studied art in Paris and London and became a painter. In 1957 his work was included in the exhibition Abstract Art in England, the first survey of postwar British abstract art. The artist immigrated to the United States in 1960 and began teaching at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1962 Coplans became a founding editor of Artforum magazine and in 1965 he was named the director of the Art Gallery at the University of California, Irvine. He became a senior curator of the Pasadena Art Museum in 1967 and in 1971, editor—in—chief of Artforum magazine. In 1978, while holding the position of director of the Akron Art Museum, he founded the Midwest art magazine Dialog and in 1980, at the age of sixty, Coplans returned to New York and became a photographer.
In recent years, Coplans has had major exhibitions throughout Europe, at venues including the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Frankfurter Kunstverein in Frankfurt and the Museum Boymans—van Beuningen in Rotterdam.