Upsilon Gallery presents The wind blows high in space, a two-person exhibition bringing together paintings and works on paper by John Hoyland RA (1934–2011) and Clyde Hopkins (1946–2018). Curated by Philip Dodd, former Director of London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, the exhibition considers the artists’ shared engagement with landscape, weather, journeys and the sublime, tracing an artistic dialogue across two generations of post-war British painting.
Exhibition text by Curator, Phillip Dodd The sky and beyond; weather; inner and outer space; journeys; the sublime and new kinds of landscape, painting in Europe and beyond – these are just some of the preoccupations of the paintings of John Hoyland and Clyde Hopkins in this two-person show. In 1980 John Hoyland was invited to be the selector of the then Hayward Annual and chose Hopkins among other predominantly abstract artists to exhibit and to mount an argument with. At that time, art such as Hoyland's and Hopkins’ was largely still framed in terms of abstraction vs figuration, its indebtedness to Abstract Expressionism and claims about the autonomy of art.