CLYDE HOPKINS
1946, UK
Greg Rook Advisory is delighted to be working with the estate of Clyde Hopkins. As a painter and an educator Clyde had a profound and lasting influence on all those around him - an influence which continues to be reassessed with his recent inclusion in the Tate Collection. As the weight and significance of his work is brought to light through exhibition and publication, it becomes increasingly clear that his contribution to contemporary painting, and British abstraction in particular, was extraordinary.
“You would expect a body of work, created over a span more than forty years, to display a pattern of development from early attempts, to the mature output where an artist’s ‘signature style’ has fully evolved and is then consolidated. But the paintings of Clyde Hopkins seem to resist this schematic interpretation. Those from the late seventies and early eighties are stylistically different to those produced in the late eighties. Another change occurs in the nineties and from 2008 or thereabouts the paintings seem to take on characteristics almost the opposite of those to be found in work from earlier in his career. So, instead of one signature style, there are several.
Each of these signature styles is fully resolved and sufficient, rather than marking an evolutionary stage in an ongoing narrative. Each deploys an established set of procedures and material properties. The pattern that emerges is more a series of brackets rather than a smooth gradient, each bracket containing a group of works with similar visual qualities.”
David Sweet
¡Box Box!, 1984, Acrylic on canvas, 269 x 170cm
Kent to Yorkshire (via the DT), 1984, Acrylic and pastel on canvas, 170 x 200 cm
TATE Collection
“The elements in Hopkins’ work seem to come from strikingly different, even contradictory, traditions, as if he is seeking to cover extremes of expressive language, rather than occupy a unified middle ground. The juxtaposition produces a peculiarly complementary effect, as though two implacable opposed artistic visions had collided in the same work. The result is an increase in intensity so great that the contents of the painting seem to pass through a tangible ordeal, a sort of visual pain barrier, which strips them of lyrical compromise, and aesthetic consolation and delivers, in the place of these lesser pleasures, the unmistakable rewards of serious poetry.”
David Sweet, 1996
Bread in Pocket 1991, Oil on canvas, 170 x 203cm
Capstan Full Strength 1994, Oil on canvas, 203 x 150cm
“…Wobbly rectangles all connecting, configurations within configurations, hot colour, imitation surfaces and real surfaces, dots and flat areas, emerging silhouette shapes that recall splashy hieroglyph figures by Miro, and funny island and bay contours that suggest garden evocations by Patrick Heron (they might be earnest homages to Heron or wry jokes on the cult of him): this is all in Clyde’s stuff. Plus the feeling of Robert Motherwell’s Little Spanish Prison (the constructed, charming side of Abstract Expressionism), the feeling of Stuart Davis’s awesomely solid American-style Cubism, Patrick Caulfield’s understated English suburban Pop art, USA cartoons, The Flintstones, funny westerns and towns with the word Gulch in the name: he gives you all these layers of pleasure. ”
Matthew Collings, 2007
“one of the great qualities of Hopkins’ new paintings, as I see them, is to have abandoned the particularly English problem of whether abstract art needs to be in some painterly relation to landscape. He has decided it would be better to avoid the term entirely. On the contrary it is through recollections of Dali, Miro, even Picasso, that the artist has remembered how the sun can sharpen the shadows, heat the landscape, and probably addle the brains. Are we madder or saner now? It makes no difference. In Hopkins’ new world, it is advisable to try both.”
Brandon Taylor, 2012
A Hillbilly in Paris, 2001, Oil on linen, 61 x 51cm
Clyde Hopkins was born in East Sussex in 1946, moving with his family to Cumbria when he was eleven. He studied Fine Art at the University of Reading in the 1960s where he met his future wife, the painter, Marilyn Hallam. He exhibited work for over forty years, produced in studios in Greenwich, Deptford and St Leonards.
Solo exhibitions included the Serpentine Gallery London (1978 and 1986), the Acme Gallery London (1979), the Ikon Birmingham and Roch-dale Art Gallery (both 1985), Salisbury Art Centre (1988), Modern Times at the Castlefield Gallery Manchester (1989), Kunstverein Kirchzarten Germany (Kunst Europa 1991), Reg Vardy Arts Foundation Sunderland (1994), Atkinson Gallery Millfield School (1996), Vodka, a Stiff Breeze and Paranoia at the London Institute Gallery (1998), the Francis Graham Dixon Gallery London (1989, 1990, 1992, 1994, 1997) and Galeria Joan Prats New York (1990 and 1994). In 2012 he had two one-man shows – brown madder at Chelsea Futurespace, London, and Indian Yellow at the Merston Gallery, Chichester.
Group exhibitions at public venues throughout the UK and Europe include the Hayward, the Whitechapel, the Axiom, the Bede, MOMA Ox-ford, the Royal Academy, John Holden Manchester, Stephen Lawrence Greenwich, Hastings Museum and Art galleries. Many private galleries have also exhibited his work.
He was awarded the Mark Rothko Memorial Fellowship (USA) in 1980-81 and in 1999 the Lorne Award. His work is in public and private collec-tions in the UK and North America.
He taught in many art colleges and universities and in 1982 was appointed Head of Painting at Winchester School of Art. He moved to Chelsea College of Art in 1990 and was made an Emeritus Professor after leaving in 2006.
“Clyde’s students adored him: they knew he was a real artist, sensed his deep appreciation of the absurd, and in his company they heard wit, wisdom and piercingly perceptive advice, usually offered with a grin. I taught at many places alongside him, but it was at Chelsea that I fully understood his skill and tact at pulling together the disparate strands emerging in art schools at that time. He saw into us all, without our noticing it, and was gentle with whatever he found.”
Mali Morris – The Guardian. Thursday 7th June 2018