I’ll stay up too, 2024
Translation is at the core of my practice. Not only linguistic, but material and structural — ideas, objects, and their components pass between encapsulating frameworks. They come apart and reassemble according to their own internal logics, revealing how identities and structures are never static but always becoming.
Matija Čop
Matija Čop (b. 1987, Croatia) is an artist living and working in London whose interdisciplinary practice spans sculpture, painting, and printmaking. Čop’s work examines the transformative potential of “translation” as ideas, structures, and their material components shift between encapsulating frameworks. Through the iterative combination, disassembly, and reconfiguration of modular elements, he constructs forms that hover between cohesion and fragmentation, evoking tensions between order and disorder, logic and intuition, manufacture and craft.
Čop’s approach is deeply informed by his personal history. Growing up amid the Balkan conflicts and Croatian war for independence in the 1990s, he developed a keen awareness of identity as something fragile, constructed, and continually renegotiated. This sensibility is further shaped by his experience navigating queer identity within post-communist Croatia’s rigid gender norms, as well as his backgrounds in philology and professional athletics, both of which instilled a sustained interest in language, form, and embodiment. These diverse influences converge in a practice attuned to processes of transformation, adaptation, and reinvention.
Čop holds an MA from the Royal College of Art, London (2017) and has collaborated with leading fashion houses including Alexander McQueen and Vivienne Westwood. He is currently a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art, London, and a guest lecturer at Harvard University, Boston.
Recent solo exhibitions include In the meantime (The Meštrović Pavilion, HDLU, Zagreb, 2024), Heat, Grief, Teeth(Galerija Kranjčar, Zagreb, 2023), and A showcase (Sapling Gallery, London, 2023). His work has also been presented at the Textile Art Biennial (Kranj, 2021), Innovative Costume of the 21st Century (A.A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow, 2019), and Modebelofte: Future Fashions (Eindhoven, 2013).
Čop’s work is included in the permanent collections of the National Museum of Modern Art at the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Museum of Arts and Crafts (Zagreb), and the Neal Baer Collection (New York).