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.
At 6pm on the 7th October, 2021, on the SuperRare NFT platform, Ansel Krut’s animation, Profile with Pipe, with music by Jem Finer, will go to auction. Following his celebrated 1000 year composition, Longplayer, Jem Finer has composed a 10 second piece of music for Ansel Krut’s animation. This is a unique collaboration between two beautifully idiosyncratic creative forces.
I would always recommend Turps Painting Magazine, but issue 24, just published, is of particular significance. Within, Mali Morris interviews Marilyn Hallam about her life with Clyde Hopkins. This atmospheric piece is both redolent of the recent past and yet also offers an insight into a world which is superbly contemporary - reminding us of painterly concerns that are continuously relevant. It is wonderful to see their work recognised and discussed.
From July, Greg Rook Advisory will be curating a series of group exhibitions on SuperRare - the most credible of NFT platforms. Please follow @greg_rook and @gregrookadvisory on Instagram and @gregcorbeau on Twitter for updates on these drops. In the coming months there will also be further collaborations with rights consortiums and first class Contemporary Collections.
Milly Thompson, Solarium Trope, 2020, acrylic and ink on canvas, 235 x 213cm
Passing the one year anniversary of lockdown felt like a milestone. The art world has, in most cases, navigated its way through the pandemic. As art lovers we were inundated with online shows and artists began to create thoughtful, original work under the new and challenging conditions. One example that particularly caught my attention was Lisa Fielding-Smith’s Quarantine Collage Series - an ongoing body of work reconfiguring fashion model images of women from popular lifestyle magazines. Once completed, it will take the form of 100 handmade paper collages produced within the lockdown and quarantine periods in Britain during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-2021. Lisa shared ten beautifully framed pieces with me.
Lisa Fielding-Smith, Eve's Non Party Dress, 2020, Editions of 1/1, Hand-made paper collage (+1 artist’s proof), 63cm x 45cm x 3.5cm (A2 size), black wood frame with black mount
Clyde Hopkins, Reluctance State Peach, 1984, acrylic on canvas, 221 x 166cm
Last monthl also saw the reappearance of a beautiful early eighties Clyde Hopkins that had long been hidden away in a Private Collection in Long Island. David Sweet, when writing about this period wrote:
“The non-tactile forms were replaced by much more aggressive and interactive elements in the next signature style. The change took place around late 1983 and the results were displayed in an exhibition of new paintings that toured nationally between late 1985 and the spring of the following year. A notable innovation was heavy black drawing creating a structure that spread throughout the painting like a burnt root system, particularly visible in Kent to Yorkshire (via the D.T.). That the structure resembles a chain of letters, albeit consisting of a limited alphabet, suggests that the works may contain hidden messages, once legible, but scattered and garbled when subjected to a highly active painting process.
In ¡Box Box! 1984 the black drawing is more wristy and dynamic, and supports another layer of gestures all tangled together. The fibrous combined structures are anchored to the canvas ground by a filamentous system of vertical drips hanging down from the tracks of liquid pigment. A Working River 1985 also consists of drawing on drawing, though the lower part of the lattice has been washed away dramatising the section of light toned cryptic writing that has survived and would be clear enough to be deciphered, if its meaning had not been irrevocably lost.
The angry, rhizoid drawing defines the second signature style. But I want to bracket this set of works with other paintings to add what I think might be a productive dimension. When looking at ¡Box Box! recently I was struck by how good it was, and not just good in a general way. It was as good specifically as a good Abstract Expressionist picture is. Then I thought of the paintings in that category that I’d seen, and concluded it was better than a lot of them.”
Clyde Hopkins: A path through dark and light by David Sweet
Please get in touch if you’d like to know more about this piece or other work by this superb painter.
Kent to Yorkshire (via the DT) 1984, Acrylic and pastel on canvas, 170 x 200cm, TATE Collection
Contact info@gregrookadvisory to discuss how and what to collect.
For those who take those first steps into this art world, as collectors and investors, they find it is an endlessly fascinating and rewarding place. Allowing an advisor to guide you through your first search and acquisition is a good way to ensure that you are looking in the right places. With no particular brief to guide this selection, I’d suggest the following as interesting artists to invest in now.
Using the mindset developed as contemporary artists, Sarah Baker and Aishleen Lester have forged parallel approaches to their creative endeavours. My contemporaries at Goldsmiths and Chelsea respectively, these thoughtful artists have used the open and critical thinking that is essential to any successful contemporary art career and developed projects that engage both their creativity and entrepreneurial spirit.
A few years ago a request from a collector led me to a parallel career as an art advisor. After 20 years working within the art world as an artist and academic, I had a unique access to artists and their studios, and a deep critical, historical and practical understanding of what constituted great art. Dealing with galleries, curators and artists over the last few years has been an absolute pleasure. This book is a celebration of some of the work that has been placed in collections, both established and new.
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.
