I finished making this work mid November 2023, and had my son a couple of weeks later in Leeds General Infirmary. The gestation of my child and these paintings shared time.
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.
