The show continues until the 23rd March
The Politics of Formica
As a painter and an educator Clyde Hopkins had a profound and lasting influence on all those around him - an influence which continues to be assessed today with his posthumous inclusion in the Tate Collection, and solo shows this year in the UK and New York. 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 abstraction in particular, was extraordinary.
Clyde was born in East Sussex in 1946, but moved to Barrow-in-Furness when he was 11 and so we were delighted to agree when Barrow asked if we would exhibit Clyde's work with Barra Culture in the Forum Arts Centre.
Clyde’s wife, Marilyn Hallam, also gifted a painting to Barrow to be hung in the Town Hall. The gift was accepted by the gracious Helen Wall who spoke movingly about Clyde’s legacy in Barrow’s cultural history.
Marilyn Hallam and Barrow Mayor Helen Wall with ‘Astronomy’ by Clyde Hopkins.
The Politics of Formica ends on the 23rd March, but a selection of Clyde’s work from the 90s and 2000s will be showing at the Linden Hall Gallery in Deal from the start of April, and on April 21st Clyde has his first solo show in New York since 1994, at Upsilon Gallery, 23 East 67th Street. This show, Chaunticlere, focuses on paintings from the late 80’s - a very particular period of Clyde’s practice.
It is fitting that these paintings are shown now in New York, as a visit by Hopkins to New York in 1984 had a profound influence on him. As noted in an essay written by Brandon Taylor in 1985 on this period of Clyde’s painting, a “…major influence on Hopkins has been American abstraction. The very scale of his paintings gives this away - as do the paintings of many of his generation in England. It derives from that impossible hybrid invented by Jackson Pollock and his school- the portable mural: a cross between an architectural decoration and a marketable object. Pre-eminently, however, it is the concept of art-as-action that is relevant here - the swirl of the arm, the dripped paint, the degree of "movement" in the drawing”.
Clyde seemed to take Miro to New York, absorb abstract expressionism and return to filter these influences thought a punkish, anarchic London lens.
Clyde in his Greenwich studio. Photograph by Andrew Payne.