Remote-ism | An Introduction to Painting & Resistance
10 – 20th December 2020
‘One is no longer in a history of art or a history of forms. They have been deconstructed, destroyed. All that remains to be done is play with the pieces’
Jean Baudrillard
At the crux of this new exhibition, is a short process film shot by Nikki Goldup, featuring Keith Hopewell painting a large blank canvas, laid flat on the ground, wearing a mask, gloves & protective clothing. The black paint being applied is unusually transmitted by the rolling of an oversized aerosol moving back & forth. This leaves tracks and over-spray wherever this ‘vehicle’ traverses. It is an oxymoron of both calculation & unpredictability that allows the composition to fall into place, until the container is left emptied of its contents. This sort of hands-free painting technique, along with the ritualist dance-like quality of his working process, evokes an eerie feeling of absence & presence, reminding us of our experience living in the strange new reality formed by the pandemic.
Over two floors of the recently relocated Hoxton Gallery, (a newly built contemporary building, which almost resembles an outdoor display cabinet), there is a curated selection of monochrome paintings completed by Hopewell over the last few years. A few of the works are from a series created on the grounds of Sir Antony Gormley’s house in rural Norfolk, whilst Keith was living there in 2019. The more recent works were painted this summer over the first lockdown period, at a barn in rural Suffolk. No stranger to life in isolated environments, Hopewell operates in liminal time, using his autonomous performative painting practice as part of his socially distanced daily exercise.
Nikki Goldup’s contribution to the exhibition space, is a forensic investigation of the traces & artefacts left by Hopewell’s practice, including discarded canvas tests, wood off-cuts, horsehair & the empty protective suit worn by Keith during the making of the paintings. Here Nikki explores object-language & hypertextual relationships, responding to Keith’s process & methodology, opening new lines of enquiry & interpretation.
The question concerning both artists is, what is art today & how do we approach it in response to the global crisis & the way in which we have been redirected into digital space?’
‘It’s the very decadence of freedoms attributed to us by our access to the internet, that remove the capability to influence any real change to the dynamics that create the conditions for making the work in the first place.’
Mark Fisher
This exhibition is about working in flux & the democratisation of historically stigmatised mediums. By focusing on the performative elements of painting and art making as a lived experience, the artists believe this is the only real route towards the true essence of why we make art.
Further Information
10 – 20th December 2020
Hoxton Gallery
17 Marlow Workshops
Arnold Circus, Shoreditch,
London E2 7JN
www.hoxtongallery.co.uk
For Press Images and Interviews contact: info@blackandwhitecreative.co.uk
To book appointments to view and sales information contact Kevin Martin:
Tel: 07930 940676
Email: hi@hoxtongallery.co.uk
Keith Hopewell was born in York 1972, studying BA (first degree hons) MA (distinction) in Fine-Art & Visual Culture at Winchester School of Art. He now lives and works in Suffolk. His practice explores the relationship between sound and non-representational painting, using unorthodox and contemporary mediums. As a multi-disciplinary artist, Hopewell’s work simultaneously collides both sculptural and painterly elements to explore sonic impressions and synesthetic perceptions. Using natural rhythms, and ritualistic systems, Hopewell’s work is about creating a pure language for the senses. Keith has exhibited internationally & has recorded 4 critically acclaimed albums for the Ninja Tune record label.
Nikki Goldup was born in Cambridge, 1972, studying BA (first degree hons) in Fine Art & Textiles at the University of Ulster, Belfast, & completing her MPhil (distinction) in Arts & Culture in Education at the University of Cambridge. She now lives and works in Suffolk. Goldup applies a multi-disciplinary approach to her practice, working with film, photography, textiles, sculpture and painting. As a researcher and artist, she has worked in a breadth of educational settings, museums and galleries both in the UK and internationally. Her work focuses around providing liberationist pedagogical experiences for participants who are often educationally or socially excluded. By fostering a culture of learning and discourse, her intention is to encourage an interplay between artist & viewer.
Words: Sir Richard Heaton
Keith Hopewell and Nikki Goldup are not the first artists to lose control, or to share their practice with chance. Every piece of clay consigned to an oven, and every sheet of paper submitted to an inked plate and a press, leaves its maker uncertain, just for a moment, about how it will turn out. If you stand in front of a Jackson Pollock painting, you might wonder how the paint came to lie in the way that it did, and what Pollock had done about it. If you had visited one of Yoko Ono’s early works, of nails in a board, the artist would have asked you to decide where the nails should go. Gerhard Richter moves from brush to squeegee, carefully aware of the degree of control he is surrendering.
But what does collaboration with chance look like in 2020, our shapeless, collapsed year in which probability and risk have dominated our lives? That is what Hopewell set out to explore this summer, with the resulting works now before us. Back in March, we were mostly told to stay indoors. But this project, as you will see in Goldup’s video presentation, could only have happened outdoors, with space away from the city in which to reflect, and room beneath an open sky in which to experiment. The nozzle on a large spray-can is depressed and held in place by elastic bands; the released air causes the can to jerk and gyrate, spraying away. In the performance that follows, Hopewell is a conductor, a magician, or a master of fireworks who almost has things in hand. The patient canvas carries the marks.
They are, despite the drama, delicate marks. Hopewell himself uses the word “painterly”. They might even be marks he would like to have made – but that would have been impossible. No human hand could move as quickly as this. What Hopewell can do is govern, regulate and choose. So the pieces that emerge are personal and, above all, they are physically assembled. It is a particular pleasure, in this year of enforced screen-time, to see that while they may not be easel paintings, they are certainly not digital files.
The other contributor is Hopewell’s thirty-year knowledge of the spray-can as an instrument with which to make pictures. If anyone knows how these cans are likely to perform, it is Hopewell. So while this whirling, low-tech painting machine creates the movement, it is not quite a random force (or wild dog) that Hopewell is unleashing. Watch the video presentation by Nikki Goldup, and you will see a story of an intriguing collaboration between man and machine. You will see also Hopewell putting on masks and full-length protective clothing, as the can throws its content into the air, and the project hurls itself closer and closer, unplanned, to the reality and imagery of the pandemic.
Goldup, meanwhile, responds to this semi-controlled mark-making by opening up new fronts in the engagement with chance. She instinctively works with textile. Dexterous, skilled and intuitive, her project asks how unlikely threads and materials might combine, aided or unaided. So she allows found horsehair to fall naturally, and distorts it with her breath. She takes the waste material and the protection clothing from Hopewell’s industry and stitches it, cuts it, binds it. The stitching is as brutal and crude as the horsehair (and Hopewell’s marks) are delicate.
Maybe, as well as chance and materials, there is something about our many worlds of art that is at stake here. What will our enjoyment, our viewing, or our making look like after the pandemic? What will change, and what will revert? Will our perception of risk be the same as before? Goldup and Hopewell both have careers that have taken them across formal art boundaries. Might some of these be relaxed, as everyone reflects and re-groups next year? It’s an idea that both artists would be happy to be hurled out and enjoyed, alongside these rewarding, impossibly gestural works.
