Five years after they were first publicly exhibited, Curt Hoppe’s Downtown Portraits (all painted between 2010 and 2019) feel very different from how they felt before. While this collection of 25 larger-than-life, acrylic on canvas portraits will continue to be perceived by most viewers as a celebration of downtown culture in the 1970s, for others the series is increasingly about the march of time and the belief that an accomplished work of art can bequeath a form of immortality.
For Hoppe the paintings (and the related collection of 126 photographs) were motivated primarily by his nostalgia for a golden period in his life. The subjects are old friends and the people he admired when he moved to New York in the 1970s. They are in his words “the class of 1978.” But he never intended the series to be just about youth. Created forty years later, Hoppe’s portraits portray people entering the last decades of their lives and visually showing the toil and triumph of the artist’s life. As Hoppe puts it, “These artists found a way to survive and to thrive… Our lives are on our faces.”
Five years is a long time. Covid has been a marker signaling the sunset of the boomer generation of which Hoppe’s subjects are a part. Already five of the twenty-four have died. As memories of their youthful achievements begin to fade, it is the determination and perseverance portrayed in each of these portraits that become apparent. A new generation might ask who are these people painted at such heroic scale? It is the portrait paintings themselves that must now provide the answer.
Downtown Portraits opens at Howl! Happening at 6 East 1st Street on Thursday, July 11th from 5pm to 8pm. The exhibition continues through August 11th.
Patti Astor (1950 – 2024) and her portrait in Curt Hoppe’s studio, acrylic on canvas, 96 x 70 inches, c. 2012
Colette Lumiere and her portrait in Curt Hoppe’s studio, acrylic on canvas, 96 x 70 inches, c. 2011
Penny Arcade and her portrait in Curt Hoppe’s studio, acrylic on canvas, 96 x 70 inches, c. 2012
Marc H Miller and his portrait in Curt Hoppe’s studio, acrylic on canvas, 96 x 70 inches, c. 2016
