Spyros Procopiou

Spyros Procopiou is a visual artist who practices between the US and Cyprus. He received his Bachelor’s degree from the Aristotle University, Greece (2016), and his Master of Fine Art in drawing and printmaking from the New York Academy of Art (2019).

Procopiou’s work is anthropo-centric. The artist begins from the human form, as one known to the viewer, to better communicate and connect with them. Innocence, eroticism, decay, corruption, and death are prevalent themes in Procopiou’s work throughout his entire practice. He is fascinated by the delicate boundary between death and eroticism that spurs him into the exploration of the human stance toward illness, deformation, and repulsion towards the imperfect form. In many works, Procopiou combines bodies or multiple motions in a single plane. In doing so he combines all the aforementioned thematics his work is centered towards.

His primary medium is pencil, chalk, and charcoal. Through the black and white depiction, his forms become united in an almost illusory way also creating a mystery behind the figures depicted. Stemming from Damien Hirst’s approach towards the representation of death, and Aleah Chapin’s approach to the nude, the artist, in turn, combines human bodies with a realism that can be seen alongside Jenny Saville and the ease with which she too combines different bodies. The intense presence of the concepts of decay and corruption in Procopiou’s work is, in turn, reminiscent of works by Marlene Dumas, Cecily Brown, and Sarah Lucas placing the artist alongside his contemporary counterparts while maintaining his own unique expression.

Through his work, however, Procopiou has launched an effort to record his own evidence, to clarify his own personal concerns – a vulnerable practice which grants him the freedom to connect with the viewer while simultaneously connecting with his own being.

Spyros Procopiou’s work has been exhibited in multiple exhibitions in Greece, Cyprus, Italy as well as New York, while numerous works belong to private collections across both Europe and the US.