EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND.-The Fruitmarket Gallery presents Louise Hopkins - Freedom of Information drawings paintings 1996—2005, on view through December 11, 2005. This substantial exhibition by Glasgow-based painter Louise Hopkins offers the first chance to see the full range of her work exhibited together in a substantial space. Bringing together paintings and drawings made over the last ten years, and including several new works specially commissioned for this exhibition, it reveals the dominant themes and ambitions of a practice which encompasses work of both immediate impact and more intimate intensity.

Hopkins is known for rarely making work on blank surfaces, choosing rather to start with a material that is pre-printed, be it with specific imagery or more generic graphic marks. From this, Hopkins 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, sheet music, maps, comics, lined paper, graph paper, book pages and photographs.

Hopkins was born in 1965 and trained at Glasgow School of Art, part of the generation of Scottish artists that includes Christine Borland, Simon Starling and Clare Barclay, and first came to prominence with an exhibition at Tramway Project Room in 1996. That exhibition included a sequence of paintings on furnishing fabric, a support with which the artist is still working, and on which she has made some of the newest work in this current exhibition.

The paintings chart a quest for an appropriate indexical procedure, for the right mark to make. Using only what is there, the artist retraces some of the motifs present in the fabric, subtly altering and redirecting the original, rendering the impersonal, machine-made designs oddly and intimately compelling, both in the areas on which she has worked and in those she has left untouched. The surface of the fabric becomes charged by her activity, spread out across it and across time with slow deliberation.

Hopkins’s work is often beautiful. It presents itself first and foremost as a sensuous, painterly practice, to be savored 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.

A substantial catalogue has been published
to accompany this exhibition, with essays, with essays
by Fiona Bradley, Greg Hilty and Ulrich Loock.
Available from the bookshop £14.95

Louise Hopkins has produced an exclusive print
on the occassion of this exhibition.
Available from the bookshop £150 framed, £100 unframed.