Macho Dickhead | Unit 3 Projects

MARCH 2023
Open to all, free to attend

Unit 3 Projects | Unit 3, Empson Street, London E3 3LT

Exhibition from 16 – 18th March
Gallery open Thursday 6 – 9 pm, Friday and Saturday 1 – 7 pm. No appointment necessary.

Michael Coppelov is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings in his first solo show in London since 2018.

Many of Michael Coppelov’s exhibition titles speak about the artist in a derisive way. Macho Dickhead is no exception. Specifically, this exhibition takes its name from a line in the experimental music group Big Hard Excellent Fish’s song Imperfect List – Pt.1 in which a woman with a thick scouse accent reads out a long list of disliked people and things. Apart from the mocking title, this link to the North West is very important to the artist who, growing up to the north of the city, values a sense of place very highly.

In this respect, each artwork in the exhibition can be linked to a very specific location – the whole coming together and forming a kind of mental map of the artist’s world – from California to Spain’s southern wildernesses. Each of the connections forming an unseen, sprawling system of connections like a rhizome: a word derived from the Ancient Greek work rhízōma, meaning mass of roots and famously used by French philosopher Giles Deleuze to describe his thinking. Like Deleuze, Coppelov believes that this subterranean creeping structure provides a useful model for his work which investigates our interconnected world and the unseen structures that hold it in place. Like the expanding rhizome, Michael Coppelov’s work has evolved from painting to a broader form of artmaking that encompasses sculpture, drawing and performance in its exploration of our interconnected world and its hidden networks. Throughout everything, and as the exhibition title suggests, humour and playfulness are paramount.

About the artist

Born in Lancashire in 1983, Michael Coppelov lives and works in London. He attended the Ruskin School of Fine Art (2005), gained an MFA at the Glasgow School of Art (2008) and has since completed two years at Turps Art School’s Onsite painting programme (2020). He has been the recipient of numerous prizes and awards including a two-year scholarship from the Leverhulme Trust, an Erasmus+ funded residency to the Cyprus College of Art and a Travel Bursary to Los Angeles. [Website | Instagram]