On View: The First Kipper Belch (1986) by Clyde Hopkins: June 2023

30 May - 30 June 2023
  • THE FIRST KIPPER BELCH (1986)

    THE FIRST KIPPER BELCH (1986)

    Acrylic on paper (on sized canvas)
    72 x 48 in
    183 x 122 cm
  • Gestural freedom combined with an intuitive approach to composition

    Gestural freedom combined with an intuitive approach to composition

    The June edition of Baldwin Contemporary's 'On View' focuses on Clyde Hopkins' 'The First Kipper Belch' (1986), a strong example of the prodigious power of non-representational 20th century British art.

     

    Fiercely delicate, the work employs lively gestural movement expanded over large areas of colour in order to produce a monumental painting.

     

    Largely in line with the artist's body of work created during the late 80's, the work evokes elements of graffiti and street art; communicating underlying concerns of the modern age whilst maintaining a strong essence of beauty and mystery. The work openly challenges the spectator by using the more brutal qualities of paint.

  • "In the 1990s, while the UK was being lectured by the YBAs that art was cool and naughty......there was a whole load of artists plugging away, doing their thing.......Painters like John Hoyland and Frank Bowling doggedly pursued their craft of big, splashy, gestural canvases. Now those artists are getting a long-overdue reappraisal."

    –Chris Waywell (2023)
  • About the Artist

    Hopkins in his Greenwich studio, London, in 1986.

    Photograph: Bruce Bernard © Estate of Bruce Bernard.

    About the Artist

    Clyde Hopkins was born in East Sussex in 1946 and moved with his family to Cumbria when he was 11, before studying fine art at Reading in the 1960s where he met his future wife, Marilyn. He exhibited work for over 40 years, produced in studios in Greenwich, Deptford and St. Leonards-on-Sea.

     

    Widely admired as a generous teacher and mentor, he was a visiting artist in many art schools during the 1970s and 1980s. From 1990 to 2006 he was Head of Painting at Chelsea College of Art and Design, London, and retired as emeritus professor at the University of the Arts London. After his death in 2018, some of his works were acquired by the Tate.

     

    Solo exhibitions during his life included the Serpentine Gallery London (1978 and 1986), the Acme Gallery London (1979), the Ikon Birmingham and Rochdale Art Gallery (both 1985), Salisbury Art Centre (1988), Modern Times at the Castlefield Gallery Manchester (1989), Kunstverein Kirchzarten Germany (Kunst Europa 1991), Reg Vardy Arts Foundation Sunderland (1994), Atkinson Gallery Millfield School (1996), Vodka, a Stiff Breeze and Paranoia at the London Institute Gallery (1998), the Francis Graham Dixon Gallery London (1989, 1990, 1992, 1994, 1997) and Galeria Joan Prats New York (1990 and 1994). In 2012, he had two solo exhibitions-Brown Madder at Chelsea Futurespace, London, and Indian Yellow at the Merston Gallery, Chichester.

     

    Group exhibitions at public venues throughout the UK and Europe include the Hayward, the Whitechapel, the Axiom, the Bede, MOMA Oxford, the Royal Academy, John Holden Manchester, Stephen Lawrence Greenwich, Hastings Museum and Art galleries. He was awarded the Mark Rothko Memorial Fellowship (USA) in 1980-81 and in 1999 the Lorne Award. His work is in public and private collections globally.

     

    As the weight and significance of his work continues to be brought to light, it becomes increasingly clear that his contribution to contemporary painting, and British abstraction in particular, was extraordinary.

  • The Brutal Qualities of Paint

    Bread in Pocket (1990-91). OIl on canvas. 170 x 203 cm

    The Brutal Qualities of Paint

    Hopkins combines Abstract Expressionism's active gestures and freedoms with an intuitive approach to composition. An instinctive yet methodical approach attest not only to his skills as a painter but also to his ability to create volume in space. Equally, his mastery of color and his ability to harness the stark emotive power suggesting an attempt to access a kind of thought-before-words, uncorrupted by the socialized realm of language.

     

    Stylistically linked to many of the most important art movements of his time, the legacy of Clyde Hopkins is his large and diverse body of work, expressing both abstraction and representation in imaginative, surprising and lyrical ways.

     

    Throughout his life and career, Hopkins drew his inspiration from one of his greatest passions: nature. Even though abstraction was clearly apparent, landscape and the natural world remained fundamental anchor points within his work.

  • A LARGE AND DIVERSE LEGACY

    "One of the great qualities of Hopkins' new paintings, as I see them, is to have abandoned the particularly English problem of whether abstract art needs to be in some painterly relation to landscape. He has decided it would be better to avoid the term entirely. On the contrary it is through recollections of Dali, Miro, even Picasso, that the artist has remembered how the sun can sharpen the shadows, heat the landscape, and probably addle the brains. Are we madder or saner now? It makes no difference. In Hopkins' new world, it is advisable to try both." 

     

    -Brandon Taylor (2012)