Discover four contemporary artworks in August’s Collector’s Note, with insights on emerging artists, collecting and the culture of the art world.
Your last work is your estate. Who controls what survives, and how an artist’s legacy becomes fact, folklore or someone else’s tidy fiction.
Over the past few weeks I’ve been thinking about what it means to start out as an artist - and what it means to stay visible once the usual structures have fallen away. My June Review focuses on recent graduates from the Slade and RCA, while other recent work has returned me to Clyde Hopkins, Marilyn Hallam, Zoe Spowage and the very different world of larger secondary-market deals. Different ends of the art market, perhaps, but the same questions keep returning: what is serious, what is overlooked and what is worth living with?
Clyde Hopkins was never an artist who sat neatly inside the usual account of British abstraction.
That is partly because the usual account is too tidy. It likes its movements, its schools, its clean lines of influence. Hopkins never quite did that. His work is too agile for it - too funny, too musical, too odd, too formally alert.
The new book, Clyde Hopkins: Paintings on Paper, focuses on a remarkable body of work made between the early 1980s and the mid 1990s. It is not a supplement to the paintings. It isn’t a side room, a footnote, or a collection of preparatory studies. These works on paper are where much of Hopkins’ intelligence is at its most immediate. The line is quicker. The colour is more exposed. The rhythm of the picture is easier to hear.
Peter Doig recently remembered first visiting Hopkins’ studio at Chelsea. Clyde asked him whether he was “the David Byrne of painting” - the kind of painter, he said, who might paint “a giraffe playing a saxophone.”
It is a perfect Clyde remark. Absurd, funny and strangely exact.
It also says something important about the work. Hopkins’ paintings are often off-centre, but never casual. They are playful, but never lightweight. They have humour without flippancy, structure without stiffness and a pictorial intelligence that keeps shifting between improvisation and control.
Paintings on Paper is part of a wider attempt to let Clyde Hopkins be seen properly again - not simply as an overlooked British painter, but as a singular artist with his own pictorial language: eccentric, rigorous, inventive and unmistakably his own.
At the moment, Blackbird Rook is moving in several directions at once, although they are more connected than they might first appear: The Satiric Grotesque, Harry Woodrow’s strange jacuzzi paintings, the forthcoming Clyde Hopkins book, new works on paper and a careful return to selected secondary-market work. This is a catch-up, but also a small statement of intent - about judgement, diligence, pleasure, risk and looking properly.
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.
Thursday 9th saw the launch of the third Greg Rook Advisory (blackbird) NFT exhibition on the SuperRare platform and I think that this is the best show yet. The artists involved have really responded to this new media and new platform, and produced work that they would not have made before and have certainly found an audience that was not there before. I’m incredibly proud of the contribution that they are making in this new world.
My interest is in helping create and share NFTs made by contemporary artists that are as much a part of their practice as anything else they create. I’m focused on just those NFTs that are made by pioneering contemporary artists - those who are exploring and really excited by the possibilities of the new media, new platform and new audience.
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.
Traditional ways of seeing are based on geometric perspective - shared by human vision, painting and film. New technologies have collapsed these physical distances and so uprooted the familiar patterns of perception on which our culture and politics have been grounded. The distinctions between near and far, between an object and a horizon against which the object stands out have been erased by the real-time electronic transmission of information. If information from any point can be transmitted with the same speed, the concepts of near and far, horizon, distance and space itself no longer have any meaning.
We might feel that we can grasp the majesty of the pyramids, the beauty of a far-flung wilderness, or the haunting atmosphere of an interior, but, if experienced through a screen, our understanding is distorted. In this second SuperRare exhibition with GRA, the artists consider natural and man-made environments, interior and exterior landscapes, and investigate the possibilities and distortions of the new technologies on our ways of understanding the world around us. They consider the magical possibilities of the digital realm as a positive companion to ‘real’ experience. They explore what it is to experience and be confused by it.
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.
