James Georgopoulos

Using techniques that combine the artist’s intention, Georgopoulos has consistently worked with imagery that is generally considered off-limits. His work with weaponry, film, automobiles, and pornography is an exploration into male identity, and a self-inquiry into the reasons these objects and subjects are charged with the historical residue they contain.

In 2016, Georgopoulos' solo exhibition, The Earth is Flat, critiques the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and the values and hazards implicit to autonomous computing. This new body of work addresses technology’s integration and prevalence in the alteration of human life in the modern age. The artist’s four sculptures, Luddite, Zeus, Weight Watcher and Autonomous X12 themselves are superficially interconnected as to insinuate that technology has implemented itself as an indissoluble event in human history.

For There is No End, a 2015 solo exhibition, Georgopoulos follows in the same lineage of artists such as John Chamberlain or even Marcel Duchamp, by using objects – old car parts, disused slot machines and other jettisoned materials – the artist investigates the self-cannibalizing culture of consumerism. In Rodeo Drive Georgopoulos displays the wrecked body of a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow, powder coated in white and dripping in automotive gold chrome against a scaled video of famed Rodeo Drive, playing via projection.

Georgopoulos has been featured in several publications including Flaunt, Bullett Magazine, Treats Magazine, and LA Weekly. He has exhibited internationally, including a solo exhibition at Photo L.A. 2014. He was included in Phillips de Pury’s contemporary sale in 2012, and was featured as the artist of honor in 2012 at the Art of Elysium Fifth Annual Heaven Gala.

Identity also plays a role in a series of sculptural retellings of Greek mythologies that Georgopoulos began working on at the end of 2013. This series contains works that are highly technical, utilizing found industrial elements to create idols of Greek gods, which serves to continue his exploration into post-industrial ideas of manufacture and mythmaking. He is also developing a series of sculptures that include video installations housed in shaped automobile frames, unveiled to the public in fall 2014 with Vacation.

Georgopoulos relocated to Los Angeles in the early 1990s to work in the film industry with directors such as Oliver Stone and Zack Snyder, which eventually led to a career as an art director for commercials and music videos, including Pink Floyd's Take it Back. During this time, Georgopoulos also worked on several design projects, most notably for Eddie Sotto and Current TV.

James Georgopoulos (born 1966 in Manchester, New Hampshire) is a Greek-American visual artist. Georgopoulos works with painting, sculpture, and video installation to address a relationship between highly skilled production techniques, pop culture, and taboo iconography. His work is in various collections, including the Panavision USA Collection. He lives and works in Venice, California.

Georgopoulos' paintings are meant to emulate the flat, transparent texture of the automobile-obsessed Finish Fetish artists of the 1960s such as Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, and Craig Kaufman, while his work with pornographic images—which, despite his tendency to use organic pixilated techniques, have been banned from galleries—calls to mind the controversial pieces that landed Wallace Berman in jail in the 1960s.