Karl Kopinski

The British artist talks Gary Evans through a varied career, which includes video game concepts and portraits of cyclists.

Karl Kopinski has an ongoing series of paintings about professional cycling. These paintings don’t show the roads on which teams race, routes leading up and down the rolling green hills of Tuscany, through the packed streets of Paris. They don’t show dozens of speeding cyclists packed tightly together, the combative side of the sport, the danger. They don’t even show bikes. Karl’s paintings are essentially close-ups of sweaty blokes in lycra pulling faces.

Take his portrait of Marco Pantani: brow deeply creased, mouth hanging open, face twisted with physical strain. Cycling fans will know why Karlpicked the Italian cyclist as a subject. In 1998 Pantani won the Tour de France and the Giro d’Italia, one of only a handful of cyclists to come top in cycling’s two most prestigious races in the same year. He was an aggressive rider, shaved his head, and wore bandanas and earrings. Fans loved him and called him The Pirate. Karl’s painting of Pantani seems to work like a good piece of photojournalism: illuminating both sportsman and sport, capturing a moment.

Karl does sometimes work from photographic reference, and a quick Google search brings up the exact image he used to paint Pantani’s portrait. He’s taken away the background – road, bike, spectators – but he’s added something, too. There’s a haunting aspect about Pantani’s eyes, something suggesting they’re troubled by more than just physical strain. It’s the kind of thousand-yard stare that reminds you of soldiers photographed after the battle, the stare that you see in all of Karl’s cycling portraits.

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