The drawing project Theoria (2015-2020) by award-winning contemporary artist Zoran Poposki is a series of post-conceptual works on paper that the artist has been focused on developing from 2015 onwards, and so far contains more than 100 works in total. Combining different techniques (ink, acrylic ink, graphite, lumocolor, gouache, graphite on paper, as well as silkscreen), the project is realized as a series of portraits of monumental figures from the world of philosophy, literature and art, that represent the author’s personal beacons, from Friedrich Nietzsche and Virginia Woolf to Walter Benjamin and Judith Butler.
Having in the past worked extensively through the format of the self-portrait, in Theoria Poposki is using the portraits as a substitute for the author’s self, exploring the extent to which the mapping of a constellation of influences and connections can serve to replace a more straightforward self-portrait.
Theoria by Poposki features: Joseph Beuys, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, August Strindberg, Karl Marx, Franz Kafka, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, William S. Burroughs, Walter Benjamin, Bertholt Brecht, Ai Weiwei, Baruch Spinoza, Jacques Derrida, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Tristan Tzara, Paul Eluard, Andre Breton, Hans Arp, Salvador Dali, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, Rene Crevel, Man Ray, Rembrandt van Rijn, Gilles Deleuze, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Francisco Goya, Gustave Dore, Eugene Delacroix, Walt Whitman, Jack Kerouac, Umberto Eco, Hannah Arendt, Virginia Woolf, Judith Butler, Simone de Beauvoir, Homer, Diego Velázquez, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Jacques Lacan, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Herbert Marcuse, Sigmund Freud, John Coltrane, Federico Garcia Lorca, Marina Tsvetaeva, Pablo Neruda, Li Bai, Paul Valery, Arthur Rimbaud, Denis Diderot, Ludwig van Beethoven, William Shakespeare, Thomas Mann, Herman Hesse, Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin, Immanuel Kant, Arshile Gorky, Bela Bartok, Arnold Schoenberg, Anne Frank, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marc Chagall, Frederic Chopin, Stuart Hall, Leonardo da Vinci, El Greco, Botticelli, Albrecht Durer, Artemisia Gentileschi, Elias Canetti, Camille Pissarro, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Jan van Eyck, Nikola Tesla, Marina Abramovic, Marcel Proust, Jean Michel Basquiat, David Hockney, Raphael, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Julian Schnabel, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Peter Paul Rubens, Georg Baselizt, Anselm Kiefer, Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Johann Sebastian Bach, Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky, and others.
Various selections of artworks from the series have been exhibited at: National Gallery of Macedonia in Skopje, Art Stays International Festival of Contemporary Art in Slovenia, and Osage Art Foundation in Hong Kong.