Louise Hopkins is an artist who has lived and worked in Glasgow since 1992. She received her MFA from GSA in 1994.
She investigates ways in which painting and drawing can connect to other language systems. She paints and draws onto surfaces that already contain information such as world maps, catalogue pages, patterned furnishing fabric, photographs, song sheets and comics, making a contrast between mass-produced printed matter- and the role it plays in privileging flatness, consumerism and certainty- and paint which with its different qualities can be used to oppose, protest against and transform the printed matter. The processes and problems of representation and how painting can meet the challenges of mechanical and digital reproduction are some of the concerns that are part of this enmore...
Louise Hopkins is an artist who has lived and worked in Glasgow since 1992. She received her MFA from GSA in 1994.
She investigates ways in which painting and drawing can connect to other language systems. She paints and draws onto surfaces that already contain information such as world maps, catalogue pages, patterned furnishing fabric, photographs, song sheets and comics, making a contrast between mass-produced printed matter- and the role it plays in privileging flatness, consumerism and certainty- and paint which with its different qualities can be used to oppose, protest against and transform the printed matter. The processes and problems of representation and how painting can meet the challenges of mechanical and digital reproduction are some of the concerns that are part of this enquiry.
Her response to context has recently been extended to making large scale works for urban and rural environments, for example in 2017 she made Dance Number - a 12 metre x 2.5 metre work specially commissioned for the central part of the temporary wall that surrounded the historic Glasgow School of Art Mackintosh Building, whilst restoration took place. In 2018 she made Flying Fox, a 12 month project culminating in a large scale temporary commission for the walls of CAMPLE LINE in rural Dumfriesshire. With these works she is engaged with how systems and abstract pattern have the potential to connect us with environment and open up performative spaces.
In 2017 she undertook a Research Residency by invitation at Cove Park in Argyll and Bute and also in 2017 her work was included in NOW - Place and Journey, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. In 2016 her work was included in À visage découvert, Ateliers des Arques, Les Arques. In 2015 a group of her paintings made on catalogue pages were included in Dévider le réel, Les Abattoirs, FRAC Midi-Pyrenees. She showed work in Ballet of the Palette, GOMA, Glasgow (2015), and in 2014 she had a one person exhibition Black Sea, White Sea which was part of GENERATION - a nationwide celebration of Contemporary Art in Scotland.
Public collections include Museum of Modern Art, New York; Arts Council of England; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. In 2014/15 she received an Artists’ Bursary from Creative Scotland.
Her work corresponds to the strategic theme Contemporary Art and Curating.
