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Indepth Arts News:
"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
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