"Louis Hopkins: Freedom of Information paintings drawings 1996-2005"
2005-10-08 until 2005-12-11
Fruitmarket Gallery
Edinburgh, , UK United Kingdom

This substantial exhibition by Glasgow-based painter Louise Hopkins offers the first chance to see the full range of her work. Bringing together over 35 paintings and drawings, and including several new works specially commissioned by The Fruitmarket Gallery, it reveals the dominant themes and ambitions of a practice which encompasses work of both immediate impact and more intimate intensity.

Born in 1965 and trained at Glasgow School of Art, Hopkins is known for rarely making work on blank surfaces. She chooses rather to start with a material that is pre-printed, be it with specific imagery or more generic graphic marks. From this, she takes inspiration, developing appropriate painted or drawn gestures with which to engage with the surface and take control of the information printed on it. This exhibition includes work on furnishing fabric (the support for which she originally became known and to which she has returned for a major new painting) and also sheet music, maps, comics, lined paper, graph paper, book pages and photographs.

Hopkins’s work is often beautiful. It presents itself first and foremost as a sensuous, painterly practice, to be savoured slowly and appreciated for its skill and care. However, the primary impulse behind the artist’s activity is rarely one of embellishment, but is more often harsh and disruptive; a drive to disorientate both the system of meaning inherent to the surface with which she starts and the viewer’s response to it. In its consistent variety, hers is a practice which seeks to engage in order to interrupt; to slow down and divert the flow of information across surfaces so that the familiar becomes less familiar and we can never again trust our response to the authenticity of the pre-existing mark.

The exhibition is accompanied by a major new publication produced by The Fruitmarket Gallery. Lavishly illustrated, it includes essays by Fiona Bradley, Greg Hilty and Ulrich Loock. (£14.95) PF

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