CLYDE HOPKINS - Paintings 2000 - 2017, 15th November - 12th December, Private View 14th November, 6 - 8pm, BLOND CONTEMPORARY, 7 Piccadilly Arcade, SW1Y 6NH.
“… (the paintings are) tough and put together with a cool lightness of hand which conceals the lucid pictorial intelligence which has gone into their making.”
This new body of paintings combines aerial landscapes and floating shapes - figuration, colour-fields, texture and abstraction. ‘Kites' are seen from above - painted with brush, roller and airbrush. They are textured and evidence process and changes in direction through overlapping layers. They show clean, machine-like fades and colour blocks that overwrite thoughts, mistakes and past potential futures.
When we talked about his current position relative to his painting, his reference to a previous Stuart Cumberland as the author of the work suggested that there might be rich parallels to be drawn between working with Cumberland’s painting, working with an artist’s estate and questions of authorship around painting and post-conceptual painting in particular.
2021, Giclee print on Archival paper, Edition of 25, 25 x 25cm
Throughout lock down, as we were dealing with isolation and the extraordinary new circumstances, Rachael House was documenting her thoughts through almost daily drawings that she published on Instagram.
Launching on Friday 28th May is a book of those drawings - Resistance Sustenance Protection.
Resistance Sustenance Protection is a year of drawings - a pandemic record, an archive and a call for change.It reflects on the political and personal of the pandemic, locally and globally, addressing queer issues, mental health, daily walks and raging about government.
To coincide with the launch, Rachael and I have published 12 of those drawings as limited edition prints. 20% of the cost of each print will be donated to the Alzheimers Society, and the remaining 80% of one particular drawing, the viral ‘Wash your hands’, will be donated to The Good Law Project.
Wash your hands, Giclee print on Archival paper, Edition of 25, 25 x 25cm
“In April 2020, House posted a comic strip reading ‘However thoroughly you wash your hands, if you voted for this government – they will never be clean’ (9 April 2020, p.x). Each window of the four-square grid features a close-up of hands, washing. While the first three drawings refer to the government’s illustrated handwashing guidelines, the blemished palm in the final square refers to Lady Macbeth, the Shakespearean character whose ambition leads her to murder. Despite getting what she wants, she is ultimately driven to psychosis, unable to escape the vision of her bloodied hands. House’s drawing summed up our collective rage. It was shared by thousands.”
Rosie Cooper, Head of Exhibitions, De Le Warr Pavilion
Gaslight the nation, Giclee print on Archival paper, Edition of 25, 25 x 25cm
“Rachael House is part of a transtemporal, feminist family of artists and makers whose work is a form of resistance. She revels in the space between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, making use of performance, comic strips and ceramics to address themes such as queerness, ageing, mental health and gender-based discrimination. Presented in galleries and museums, House’s art can also be found in places where it can get things done: in parks, nightclubs and in the streets…
Rachael House gives us space to think, feel, and act. Her work is an affirmation that being political can be fun, that anger must be a force for change, that we cannot do without solidarity, ever, and that by sharing experiences we might be able to free ourselves from the toxicity of shame and find compassion for ourselves and for those around us. And she reminds us that, whatever happens, we must smash the patriarchy.”
Rosie Cooper, Head of Exhibitions, De Le Warr Pavilion
Bottle tree, Giclee print on Archival paper, Edition of 25, 25 x 25cm
