"Louis Hopkins: Freedom of Information paintings drawings 1996-2005"
2005-10-08 until 2005-12-11
Fruitmarket Gallery
Edinburgh, , UK United Kingdom

This substantial exhibition by Glasgow-based painter Louise Hopkins offers the first chance to see the full range of her work. Bringing together over 35 paintings and drawings, and including several new works specially commissioned by The Fruitmarket Gallery, it reveals the dominant themes and ambitions of a practice which encompasses work of both immediate impact and more intimate intensity.

Born in 1965 and trained at Glasgow School of Art, Hopkins is known for rarely making work on blank surfaces. She chooses rather to start with a material that is pre-printed, be it with specific imagery or more generic graphic marks. From this, she takes inspiration, developing appropriate painted or drawn gestures with which to engage with the surface and take control of the information printed on it. This exhibition includes work on furnishing fabric (the support for which she originally became known and to which she has returned for a major new painting) and also sheet music, maps, comics, lined paper, graph paper, book pages and photographs.

Hopkins’s work is often beautiful. It presents itself first and foremost as a sensuous, painterly practice, to be savoured slowly and appreciated for its skill and care. However, the primary impulse behind the artist’s activity is rarely one of embellishment, but is more often harsh and disruptive; a drive to disorientate both the system of meaning inherent to the surface with which she starts and the viewer’s response to it. In its consistent variety, hers is a practice which seeks to engage in order to interrupt; to slow down and divert the flow of information across surfaces so that the familiar becomes less familiar and we can never again trust our response to the authenticity of the pre-existing mark.

The exhibition is accompanied by a major new publication produced by The Fruitmarket Gallery. Lavishly illustrated, it includes essays by Fiona Bradley, Greg Hilty and Ulrich Loock. (£14.95) PF

Related Links:

Indepth Arts Resources for United Kingdom

Other Important Exhibitions in United Kingdom

Call for Artists : Community Arts Initiative - The Artist Project - Museum of Fine Art Boston Alexis Harding : Bi-product Depositories - Mummery + Schnelle Gallery der PROZESS : hunchentoot goes out 2 - Enda Odonoghue to Take Part - hunchentoot Galerie INTIMACY AND DESECRATION : The Body, Gender and Identity - CACT - centro d'arte contemporanea ticino Mark Edward Harris : The Art of the Japanese Bath - Kopeikin Gallery Call for Artists : 13th Annual Subtle Technologies Festival Explores Sustainability - Subtle Technologies, University of Toronto Art in Mind : Work by Natalia O'Neill - Brick Lane Gallery The Ione Citrin Collection - Poway Center for the Performing Arts Gallery Parallel Realities : Aishan Yu's First Solo Show in the UK - Peifen Fine Art Secrets and Confessions : Peter Sudar, John Stark, Leonard Vartic, Ioan Cristea - Ana Cristea Gallery Call for Artists : The Beast In Me, Johnny Cash - Art Influenced by the Struggle of a Man' - Nave Gallery Notations - Bruce Nauman: Days and Giorni - Philadelphia Museum of Art Beauitful Elsewhere : Fusion and Con-fusion - Migrating Cultures and the Dynamic of Exchange - Universita di Napoli - Partenope Animal Nature : Powerful Paintings, Drawings and Digital Prints by Hyacinthe Kuller-Baron - Computer Arts Gallery