PETER HOPKINS 2006 PRESS RELEASE

New Paintings
December 2, 2006 - January 6, 2007

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of eight new paintings by Peter Hopkins.
 
The entry point for this group of paintings is a work from 1988 that is presented just off the main gallery. Entitled Bleach pour #5, it is a work on unprimed linen that has been sprayed and poured with a solution of water and household bleach. The edges have been taped to produce a “framed” area and the whole is then sealed with urethane to arrest the destructive properties of the bleach. That bleach is the “mortal” enemy of all archival surfaces is partially the point. By using it, Hopkins had been not been attacking the sanctity of the material body of painting, but trying to “Cleanse it” from accumulated meaning and theory. What could fill that space once cleaned?

The current exhibition proposes one answer developed over the past twenty years. Some works, like the largest piece in the show, entitled 20 Sections “refill” that space with information which is broken and re-formed onto the painting surface like shards of a mirror. The work is suggesting that the act of making (and looking) at a deep space where meaning and beauty can occur is still possible. But beauty can be achieved only in a fractured, partially incomplete way. Other works in the show are produced with layers of sheer fabric over holographic foils that are saturated with “Social Fluids” such as medical dyes and cosmetics that Hopkins’ has used in place of paint for the past two decades. These works are more visually restrained, but function in a similar way as the more “charged” paintings, in that they can never be seen as a static object, but instead as contingent, changing in appearance as the viewer moves about them, suggesting, as the artist has said of his painting, that sometimes what is most interesting about an art object is not what it shows, but what it tries to hide.

Peter Hopkins received his BA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and his MFA from the University of Wisconsin, in 1982. Since the mid 1980s he has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout the United States and western Europe including France, Germany and Switzerland. His works have been exhibited in prestigious venues such as Thread Waxing Space, the Folkwang Museum in Essen, the Musee d’Art Contemporain in Geneva, the Corcoran Biennial, the Neue Galerie in Graz and the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as Documenta IX.

For biographical information and a selection of additional images please visit our website at www.cgrimes.com or contact CHRISTOPHER GRIMES GALLERY 310-587-3373.

2006 EXHIBITION

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