James Hopkins

Max Wigram Gallery is pleased to announce James Hopkins’ third solo show at the gallery. This selection of new work is a continuation of Hopkins’ formal investigations into the vernacular of sculpture and it’s capacity to articulate ideas. His witty, optical games, often engage a visual duality, in which our perceptual expectations are jilted, and the canny revelation functions like a punch line to a joke, a pun, or double entendre.

James Hopkins makes work about life - recasting the everyday in a perverse play that is a strange variant of the world we know. His sculptural permutations of familiar objects, or his alterations to ‘readymades’, seem to revise the Cartesian doubt, leading us to question our sensorial assumptions, pushing the logic of vision to a point of incredulity. The shock of encountering this deviation from the expected brings our attention back into the world, afresh.

Hopkins conjures illusions which blur the distinction between the real and apparent. Employing anamorphosis as a device to reflect on the prejudice inherent in any act of perception, the transformation in the moment of (mis)recognition invites the viewer to question presuppositions, and visual givens. “Beauty Spot” is a bronze sculpture which appears to be a group of gnarled trees. Yet from a particular vantage, the image is reconstituted, and two bodies entwined in fornication emerge from the negative space. The work engages the viewer in a necessary negotiation of perspectival space and the ‘hidden’ aspect places it in a genealogy of anamorphic designs, originally devised to conceal imagery of a sexual nature. The detritus littering the floor taints the erotic image with a tone of decadence, and the fallen apple specifically alludes to temptation and desire.

These games of shifting representation take a linguistic turn in works such as “Hate and Love” which involves a hand with ‘hate’ tattooed across its fingers held-up against a mirror. The use of Catoptrics inverts both the word and its signification in a throwaway quip. “Last Days of the Sun” appears to be a collection of contemporary cultural paraphernalia: bottles of Crystal; a ‘Hi-Fi’; a mirror; an electric guitar. Deposited on a set of shelves, the assemblage wouldn’t seem incongruous in the interior of a rock-star’s party pad – the abundance of gold demonstrating wealth and a ‘bling’ guise of frivolous excess and hedonism. But from the deliberate arrangement of these objects emerges an image of a skull, and, drawing on the 17th Century Vanitas tradition, each object assumes a symbolic value. The work is thus a commentary on mortality, the ultimate transience of worldly objects and the futility of superficial materiality.

Born in Stockport (UK), James Hopkins lives and works between London and Guernsey. In 2006 he had a solo exhibition at Cosmic Gallery, Paris. This year his work has been shown at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany; in Balance, Unosunove Arte Contemporanea, Rome; Timer, Triennale di Milano, Italy; Valladolid Sculpture Biennial, Spain; and in Freak Show at Musée d’art Contemporain, Lyon, France. Other group exhibitions include Still Life at The New Art Centre Sculpture Park & Gallery, Salisbury, UK. Hopkins’ work is held in (amongst others): The Saatchi Collection, London; The Zabludowicz Collection, London; The Cohen Collection, Manchester; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany.

James Hopkins