James Georgopoulos

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 was born in Manchester, New Hampshire, and began creating visual works at the age of 14 while at Cardigan Mountain School. His father was an art collector and became friends with many of the artists he collected, exposing Georgopoulos to their studios at a young age. Georgopoulos was mentored by Varujan Boghosian, Robert Eshoo, Ivan Albright and James Aponovich when he was just a teenager, leading to his eventual acceptance to Rhode Island School of Design, which Georgopoulos declined for an opportunity in Italy. In his twenties, Georgopoulos was taken under the wing of György Kepes, who was part of the Bauhaus movement, spending many of his formative years in Kepes' studios and cites Kepes as a significant influence. 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. In his paintings, Georgopoulos employs an assortment of subject matter, including guns used in blockbuster action films, cameras used to film classics, glossy automobile finishes, pornographic abstraction, and sexuality in art history to address issues of copyright protection, censorship, and the highly designed objects used in the creation of popular culture. Using techniques that combine the artist’s intention, Georgopoulos has consistently worked with imagery that is generally considered off-limits.