The eve of the beholder

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.

- SARAH CATHERALL

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 colorful 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."