Charlotte Hopkins Hall
‘Forever Entangled in a Causal Loop’

Exhibition Dates
8TH MARCH – 4TH APRIL

Open
Friday 29th March
Saturday 30th March
12 – 5pm

Closed
Sunday 31st March
Monday 1st April

Daily
Tuesday – Saturday
12 – 6PM
Or by appointment

Contact
Martin J Tickner
mj.tickner@gallery46.co.uk
+44 (0)7909 947 912
DM @gallery46whitechapel

For EVENTS & any changes to opening times
check details on Instagram

Charlotte Hopkins Hall (b, Geneva, Switzerland) lives and works in London. Since graduating from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Genève, now HEAD, her work has been exhibited internationally, notably at the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, and the Walker Gallery, Liverpool. Hopkins Hall has been selected for a number of awards including the Swiss Art Awards, the John Moores Painting Prize and the Aesthetica Art Prize. Her work is in private collections in Europe and the United States.

Hopkins Hall will donate 10% from her share of sales from the exhibition to Sea-Watch.org

Sea-Watch.org
At the end of 2014, Sea-Watch grew out of an initiative of volunteers who could not stand on the side lines witnessing people dying in the Mediterranean Sea any longer. Sea-Watch are an incredibly brave NGO who risk their lives and their liberty to rescue the capsized at sea. This small NGO alone has rescued over 45,000 people.
https://sea-watch.org/en/

‘Forever Entangled in a Causal Loop’

Comprised of large-scale paintings rendered in acrylic on canvas, alongside acrylic and wood block print on Japanese paper, the artist has drawn on idea of a causal loop to lead the way from one space to the other. The simple existence of one exhibition room exerts influence on the others and vice versa. According to Hopkins Hall, whatever our perception of the world, folly inhabits the quest for peace, and order fails to tame chaos. This is the eternal complexity of the human experience; a theme that has dominated her work for the past 20 years.

Presented in her trademark aesthetic of finely painted, hyper realistic and visually strict imagery, the paintings bring her sharp scrutiny of the paradigms that have become entrenched in recent political and social mores. The Council of Nonsense Peering at Wasted Souls, The Absconding Peacemakers diptych, Nonsense, Imposters and Rhetorical Bullshit triptych and Queuing For a Swift Exit decry today’s inexistant leadership, deficient political acumen and the effect of poor decision making.

In an era that is indisputably saturated by the image of the face, Hopkins Hall repeatedly paints the image of her back, making this motif central to her work to conceptualise social commentary. More than simply commenting on popular culture’s self-obsession, the use of this motif is threefold referencing anonymity, civic responsibility and absurdity. Whilst the paintings are not self-portraits in the tradition of painting, Hopkins Hall feels strongly that responsibility starts with self and the importance of bearing the weight of her concept.

The repeated black and white lines evoke old fashioned prison uniforms, holocaust uniforms, and their use in the paintings points to the continuous erosion of our freedoms in the Western world, whether legal, physical or psychological. In conjunction with repetitive imagery, the titles are meant as mini manifestos to introduce this absurd world in which the figures play out their roles directed by Hopkins Hall. A comedy that is not so divine, held in terrestrial purgatory, where upholding simplistic discourses is an imperfect way of looking at the world and at humanity. In these modern times perceptions are distorted and reality has been turned on its head.

The exhibition culminates in a ‘light room’, where brightness is masquerading as a sense of hope and in near invisibility; where individual stories are lost, a series of predominantly white canvases, the ‘Caravan’ paintings, address the transience and plight of mass migration in the early 21st century. What interests Hopkins Hall in the concept of the causal loop is the impact of Western capitalism, the constant political meddling and corporate vandalism creating insecurity that has forced an exodus towards the Northern hemisphere, be it for reasons of war, economy or climate. This, in turn is used as a pretext by Western governments to lean further to the political right; hence, forever being entangled in a causal loop.

For more information, please contact
Albany Arts Communications
Carla von der Becke
carla@albanyartscommunications.com
t: +44 (0) 207 879 8895
m: +44 (0) 7557 262 382