OCHI is pleased to present Transfer My Tragedy, an Online Viewing Room featuring works by New York-based artist Paul Anagnostopoulos. The works will be featured on our website from April 5 through May 10, 2022.

Drawing from the distinguishable iconographies of ancient Greek and Roman mythology, gay erotica, and personal heartbreak, Transfer My Tragedy features seven new paintings that explore sensual stories for the modern age. Visually sourcing from the cyberspace aesthetics of 90s era videogames and animations alongside retropop cultural markers such as vaporwave and neon noir, each work channels kitsch as it embraces classic myths, legends, and the human side of the masculine form. Desire, longing, and adoration vibrate through each hot magenta sky as moments of melancholy, bittersweet love and heavenly pleasure unfold across the surface. Recurring references to nostalgia, catharsis, and the cyclical nature of time—each energetic hue defies timelessness—bridge the present and the past in unorthodox harmony.

Anagnostopoulos creates images of Everyman—his idealized strength, beauty, and comical melodrama dominate each scene—portals to mystical worlds of agony and pleasure. Butterflies appear throughout each painting as symbols of the fleeting, delicate nature of time, of transformation, and as an ode to gaudy, sentimental internet consumer culture. Much like the soul leaving the body after death, the qualities of life flicker in and out, dripping with soulful emotion. With muscles taught and legs spread wide under many moons, the figure in Holding Up A Long Time (2021) stands before jagged mountains as his solar plexus burns—body and earth in holy union. Redefining the Greek Titan Atlas with cheeky innuendos to boyish “mooning” or Ben Dover, Anagnostopoulos finds humor in the ancient past and breathes life into weary tales.

Uplifting queer intimacies and tender masculinities, Anagnostopoulos paints paradises that celebrate the architecture of the body, the metaphorical potency of nature, and eternal love. Energetic and buzzing with passion, the works in Transfer My Tragedy overflow with devotion and poetry as they meditate on forgotten histories.

Paul Anagnostopoulos (b. 1991 Merrick, NY) is an MFA candidate at Hunter College in New York, NY and received a BFA from New York University in New York, NY. Anagnostopoulos’ work has been exhibited at international venues including the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, and Trestle Gallery in New York, NY; Bienale Neodvisnih in Ljubljana, Slovenia; Hellenic Museum of Michigan in Detroit, MI; Los Angeles Center for Digital Art in Los Angeles, CA; and GoggleWorks Center for the Arts, Reading, PA. Anagnostopoulos’ work is held in various public and private collections including the Museum of Modern Art Archives and Library, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York Public Library, Rhode Island School of Design, and Yale University. His work has been featured in Artnet News, VICE, New American Paintings, Envision Arts Magazine, Postscript Magazine, and Friend of the Artist. Anagnostopoulos currently lives and works in New York, NY.