Scotland and Venice Biennale

Louise Hopkins

Using a variety of materials such as furnishing fabric, newspapers, song sheets, maps and comic strips as the basis for her work Louise Hopkins's work presents itself first and foremost as a sensuous, painterly practice. However, the primary impulse behind the artist´s activity is rarely one of embellishment, but is more often disruptive; a drive to disorientate both the system of information on which her gaze falls and the viewer´s response to it.

Hopkins first became known for her works using flower patterned fabric, in which she recreated parts of the fabric pattern on the reverse side of the material, adopting the same style and using tiny, delicate brushstrokes.

She later used maps as a source material, obscuring the sea with a network of roads and cities and painting over the land in the same colour as the sea. Painstakingly painted using the same techniques as the original source, these works are at the same time familiar and disorientating.
In recent works using comic strips, Hopkins uses erasing as a creative process, removing all words and pictures to leave only thought and speech bubbles, which are painted in black and white.

Drawing attention to the previously unnoticed structure of the comic strip the viewer is encouraged to think about what the story may be, working only from the small amount of remaining information.

Recent projects and exhibitions include: (In 2005) Freedom of Information (Solo exhibition), The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; Mythomania (Group exhibition) The Metropolitan Galleries, Folkestone, Kent (In 2004) The Round Room (Solo exhibition), Talbot Rice, Edinburgh; Cool Britannia (Group exhibition), Glasgow Print Studio, Glasgow (In 2003) Solo shows at doggerfisher, Edinburgh and Andrew Mummery Gallery, London; New: recent acquisitions of contemporary art (Group exhibition), Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; Sunday Afternoon (Group exhibition), 303 Gallery, New York.

Louise Hopkins was born in 1965 in England. She graduated from Newcastle upon Tyne Polytechnic in 1988 and gained an MFA from the Glasgow School of Art 1994.

Louise Hopkins is represented by:
doggerfisher/Susanna Beaumont
11 Gayfield Square
Edinburgh
EH1 3NT
Tel: +44 (0)131 558 7110
www.doggerfisher.com

Mummery+Schnelle
83 Great Titchfield Street
London
W1W 9HR
Tel: +44 (0)20 7636 7344
www.mummeryschnelle.com

For examples of her work visit the doggerfisher website