Georgie Hopton: Laughed – I Could Have Cried

Exhibitions

25 January - 2 March 2003

MK G starts the new year with solo exhibitions from London-based artists Sarah Staton and Georgie Hopton. The two shows will be the largest surveys of each artist’s work to date, giving an overview of their practice in the last 10-15 years and reflecting the scope and diversity of their careers so far.

Georgie Hopton combines playfulness with tragedy, creating pieces in which humour and sadness collide. Like Sarah Staton, she works in a variety of media and will be showing paintings, drawings, sculptures and photographs in the Cube and Middle Galleries. Her continual re-workings of her own and other artists’ work results in a circular vision tinged with the pathos of what she calls “l’homage pathétique”. For Hopton, it is this process of re-working existing pieces which gives her work its flavour of comic sadness. The idea of nature morte, which she takes literally as meaning “deadlife”, has inspired much of her work over the last few years. Painted clay jugs, skulls, flowers and apples sit listlessly, shadowed by neighbouring fake bronze palettes and logs. A Pierrot watches sadly over the scene, Harlequin’s batons lean, immobile, against a wall. Life, as revealed in Hopton’s exhibition, is a circus, with all its ups and downs, misery and hilarity.

Press Release