Clyde Hopkins: Chaunticlere: Paintings from the 1980s

Upsilon Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of seminal paintings by the late British artist Clyde Hopkins (1946-2018) titled Chaunticlere: Paintings from the 1980s, on view from April 22 to June 18, 2022. Presented in cooperation with the artist’s estate, this group of works places enormous value on emotional spontaneity, instinctive creation and scale in response to political and social issues in the wake of Thatcherism. This exhibition marks the first showing of Hopkins’ artworks with Upsilon Gallery in New York.

Stylistically linked to many of the most important art movements of his time, Hopkins’ legacy is his large and diverse body of work, expressing both abstraction and early referents to representation in imaginative, surprising and lyrical ways. Throughout his life and career, Hopkins drew his inspiration from one of his greatest passions: nature. In the paintings selected for this exhibition, Hopkins demonstrated visceral attitudes toward the then political and social climate in the UK. Even though abstraction was apparent, landscape and the natural world were still important and acted as a starting point, as is evident in the pictures, Reluctance: State Peach (1984), The Diary and the Coast (1985), and Diving for Pearls (1986). The covert reference in the titles to a moment of political confrontation was manifest in the turbulent nature of the paintings.

Hopkins combined Abstract Expressionism’s active gestures and freedoms with the intuitive approach to composition he had been developing. He worked instinctively, yet methodically—these works represent the evolution of his skill as a painter. It speaks to his ability to create volume in space, 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.

About this selection of paintings, Metropolitan Museum of Art curator John Guy notes, “[They] represent Hopkins’ intensely personal psychological journeying, that is at once dangerous and inviting. Whilst venturing far from shore, Hopkins always extended a lifeline to his viewer, a glimpse of something that just might be a remembering of something figurative, a powerful idea, or a quirky title that evoked its own sense of place, or, of a moment experienced, made unexpectedly familiar.”

Guy goes on, “[They] have another quality not immediately apparent at first glance: they are deeply pleasurable. Colours have a remarkable intensity, a dark ominous blue or impasto black verging on the foreboding, creating a tension that is then relieved on occasion by grid structures or by arabesques that cartwheel across the composition. Light blues and whites are given the luminous effervescence of reactive minerals, radiating off the dark dense canvas. Others have a lighter mood, curlicues that evoke a memory of Matisse’s balcony, with the atmosphere of a balmy Mediterranean summer night. In Hopkins abstractions, you always stay connected, no matter how tenuously, with the material world.”