Violet Hopkins
14 Nov - 08 Dec 2007
VIOLET HOPKINS
BaliceHertling in collaboration with Foxy Production, New York, presents "Bultungin", the inaugural Paris solo exhibition of Los Angeles artist Violet Hopkins. Bultungin, meaning “I change myself into a hyena” in the Kanuri language of north-west Africa, is a new series of ink paintings inspired by wildlife documentaries and animal mythology. With their haunting call, hyenas have long been associated in folklore with divination and imagined as tools of demons and witches, while early naturalists believed them to be hermaphrodites due to the difficulty of defining their gender.
By focusing on the metaphoric language of nature, Hopkins gives the hyena an anti-hero resonance.
Exploring transformation and perception, the exhibition presents life and death struggles for survival, where the need for violent action or passive camouflage are daily imperatives. In landscapes where sky, sea, and bushland are reduced to their graphic bare bones, chameleons, lizards, sharks and hyenas appear in close-up, mid-shot or long-shot, as if each drawing were a panel from a film storyboard or a visual novel.
Known for the intensity of her colors and the tension she creates between figuration and abstraction, Hopkins here makes a shift from her earlier more elaborate compositions to more elemental ones. Using a muted palette and sparse mise-en-scene, the series’ subtle depictions of light, shadow, and form present an illusory world of action that may be both anthropomorphic and, paradoxically, always on the verge of collapsing into non-representational fields of color and line.
VIOLET HOPKINS (El Paso, Texas 1973) holds a BFA from the University of Texas at Austin, and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia.
Selected exhibitions include Gallery Sora, Tokyo (solo)(2008); Galerie Moriarty, Madrid (2008); BaliceHertling, Paris (2007); Red Eye: Los Angeles Artists from the Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL (2006-7); Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro NC (2006-7); Foxy Production (solo) (2007); David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (solo) (2006); Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London (solo with Lesley Vance) (2006); Peres Projects, Berlin (2006); The Altoids Curiously Strong Collection (various venues) (2005); Deitch Projects, New York (2004); David Zwirner Gallery, New York (2004); CRG, New York (2004); Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo (2003). Hopkins has been featured in Artforum, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Artweek, Review, and V Magazine.
Hopkin’s Bultungin series has been developed in Giverny where she is currently artist in residence at Fondation Claude Monet. BaliceHertling seeks to profile the activities of foreign artists working in France, as well as fostering dialogue between the national scene and the international art world.
BaliceHertling in collaboration with Foxy Production, New York, presents "Bultungin", the inaugural Paris solo exhibition of Los Angeles artist Violet Hopkins. Bultungin, meaning “I change myself into a hyena” in the Kanuri language of north-west Africa, is a new series of ink paintings inspired by wildlife documentaries and animal mythology. With their haunting call, hyenas have long been associated in folklore with divination and imagined as tools of demons and witches, while early naturalists believed them to be hermaphrodites due to the difficulty of defining their gender.
By focusing on the metaphoric language of nature, Hopkins gives the hyena an anti-hero resonance.
Exploring transformation and perception, the exhibition presents life and death struggles for survival, where the need for violent action or passive camouflage are daily imperatives. In landscapes where sky, sea, and bushland are reduced to their graphic bare bones, chameleons, lizards, sharks and hyenas appear in close-up, mid-shot or long-shot, as if each drawing were a panel from a film storyboard or a visual novel.
Known for the intensity of her colors and the tension she creates between figuration and abstraction, Hopkins here makes a shift from her earlier more elaborate compositions to more elemental ones. Using a muted palette and sparse mise-en-scene, the series’ subtle depictions of light, shadow, and form present an illusory world of action that may be both anthropomorphic and, paradoxically, always on the verge of collapsing into non-representational fields of color and line.
VIOLET HOPKINS (El Paso, Texas 1973) holds a BFA from the University of Texas at Austin, and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia.
Selected exhibitions include Gallery Sora, Tokyo (solo)(2008); Galerie Moriarty, Madrid (2008); BaliceHertling, Paris (2007); Red Eye: Los Angeles Artists from the Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL (2006-7); Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro NC (2006-7); Foxy Production (solo) (2007); David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (solo) (2006); Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London (solo with Lesley Vance) (2006); Peres Projects, Berlin (2006); The Altoids Curiously Strong Collection (various venues) (2005); Deitch Projects, New York (2004); David Zwirner Gallery, New York (2004); CRG, New York (2004); Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo (2003). Hopkins has been featured in Artforum, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Artweek, Review, and V Magazine.
Hopkin’s Bultungin series has been developed in Giverny where she is currently artist in residence at Fondation Claude Monet. BaliceHertling seeks to profile the activities of foreign artists working in France, as well as fostering dialogue between the national scene and the international art world.