Copley

"My life is a quest for the ridiculous image."
William N. Copley

On Wednesday, 10 April 2024 Tommaso Calabro inaugurates Copley, an exhibition celebrating the American artist William N. Copley (1919-1996), known for being an important link between European surrealism and American Pop art.

A versatile artist, writer gallerist, patron, publisher and collector, connected through friendship with Marcel Duchamp, Copley lived in Paris, New York, Connecticut and Florida. Following the experience of the Copley Galleries in Los Angeles in 1948 – where Copley first presents on the West Coast works by surrealists such as René Magritte, Yves Tanguy, Roberto Matta, Joseph Cornell, Man Ray and Max Ernst, many of which find their way into his private collection – Copley decides to devote himself entirely to self-taught painting.

Signing his work with the pseudonym "CPLY," starting from the late 1940s, the artist creates naïve portraits and surrealist-inspired subjects. In Paris, where he lives between 1951 and 1962, he becomes an integral part of the Impasse Ronsin in Montparnasse, where he meets and works alongside Yves Klein, Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, and Constantin Brancusi, developing his distinctive figurative style characterized by curvilinear figures (often rendered without faces), bold contour lines, luminous colors, flattened pictorial space and comic-inspired motifs.

The exhibition Copley at Tommaso Calabro features a selection of about twenty paintings and drawings created between the 1950s and the 1970s. It includes works that Copley executed after his return to New York in 1963 – such as a piece from the X-Rated series (1972-1975), featuring figurative distortions of portraits of erotic subjects taken from pornographic magazines bought on 42nd Street – and paintings from the Nouns series presented by Alexander Iolas, Copley's main gallerist and supporter, between 1970 and 1972: images of everyday objects, enlarged and placed in abstract spaces.... read the rest of the article»