Meet the artist / Andrej Brumen Čop
Meet the artist / Andrej Brumen Čop
Please introduce yourself briefly.
A being with glasses that is walking on its winding path.
What do you do as an artist?
Ha, hard to say. Most likely, by recognizing some kind of meaning in reality, I observe the responses within myself and other people, and then I find echoes of that in my work.
How do you create? Do you have a protocol?
I am very inclined to rituals, but they do not always bring success. Increasingly, it seems good to be alone then.
What do you find to be ideal conditions for artistic creation?
That I’m not hungry, that I don’t get cold, and like I said, that I’m alone then. As a company, I only benefit from a model or an animal, a cat, a dog.
What do you think of when you hear the word »atelier«?
I think about how few times in my life I have experienced the feeling of a atelier, a space dedicated exclusively to artistic creation, if I may put it that way.
What inspires you?
I never know in advance what exactly will move me to the point where I will start something. The spectrum is wide, other beings, the environment, literature, thinking, daydreaming, even dreams, and of course my, say, emotional response to life.
What has inspired you to create lately?
A lately not as much. Perhaps the technique itself even more so. Shower, paper, water.
How do you balance art and work for survival?
It is difficult because my work for survival is meant to create students, which is again a kind of creativity, but we are in different stages, they are full of youthful energy, and I already feel “middle age”.
What is the most difficult thing for you on the artistic path?
There - just aligning yourself with work for survival.
What is the greatest gift of art for you personally?
Meaning, beauty, meetings, it replaces my official religiosity and also the fact that it somehow "teaches" me all the time - but not in a didactic way - about living in the world and elsewhere.
How do you experience exhibiting of your work?
Exhibition has been a work in my life that has accompanied creation for thirty years and so these experiences have been from the worst to the best.
What is your future artistic challenge?
I also wonder what it will be. I said I never know in advance what will challenge me. The other thing is desires, hopes, because systematic planning does not work for me.
How do you experience current self-isolation?
Not to mention how stupid it seems to me all together, distance school and similar nonsense. Isolation, however, is, paradoxically, an ideal state for me. Of course in a different sense.
How would you complete the sentence: Art is ....
to find the meaning of life ...
Andrej Brumen Čop was born in 1967 in Maribor. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana. He graduated under Metka Krašovec in 1993 and completed the specialist postgraduate programme in painting in 1995. He studied in Graz (1994), travelled to Japan (1996), was awarded a scholarship by the Czech Government and studied as a visiting student at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts (1997). He received a working grant from the Slovene Ministry of Culture (2000) for a residency in New York, as well as a residency at the Slovene Studio of the Ministry of Culture in Berlin (2009). He was the editor-in-chief of the Likovne besede art magazine (2001–2002). Since 2009 he has been teaching drawing and painting at the Faculty of Education in Ljubljana, where he also runs the Gallery of the Faculty of Education or the PeF Gallery. Alongside painting, he is also working in illustration. His works have been shown at numerous exhibitions at home and abroad, and are included in several Slovenian and foreign collections. He lives and works in Ljubljana.
