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This substantial exhibition offered the first chance to see the full range of Louise Hopkins’s work. Bringing together paintings and drawings made over the last ten years, including several commissioned especially for the exhibition, it revealed the dominant themes and ambitions of a practice which encompasses work of both immediate impact and more intimate intensity.

Born in 1965 and trained at Glasgow School of Art, Hopkins is part of the generation of artists working in Scotland 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 material to which the artist has recently returned.

Hopkins is known for working on pre-printed surfaces, and in this exhibition were works on furnishing fabric, sheet music, maps, comics, lined paper, graph paper, book pages and photographs. In its consistent variety, hers is a practice which seeks to engage with information as it is presented on surfaces in the world around us, and to interrupt and corrupt it. Hopkins slows down and diverts the flow of printed information so that the familiar becomes less familiar and we can never again trust our response to the authenticity of the pre-existing mark.

Exhibition supported by La Colección Jumex, México

Download the Exhibition Guide

Images: Alan Dimmick