NEW YORK, NY.- Bernarducci Gallery is presenting Downtown Portraits, an exhibition of large-scale monochrome paintings by Curt Hoppe. Hoppe (b. 1950, St. Paul, MN) evolved as a cartoonist, photographer, and, finally, hyper-realist painter in the hipster milieu of New York in the late 1970s, and never left the center of the subterranean –literally and figuratively -- arts scene.

The subjects here are peers, long-time downtown denizens—artists, critics, musicians, and other creative gadflies with names you will recognize, along with a few up-and-comers, including local workers and residents on track as the next idiosyncratic zeitgeist-influencers. In portraiture the subject constitutes half of the artistic production and effect, and is paramount. Hoppe exploits his subjects’ power by choosing moments of public self-presentation, prior to the photographic sessions that undergird his methodological painting process. That includes compositional isolation and the reduction of color evocative photographic light—namely air-brush grisaille, to create stark character studies stripped of diversion.

Both precisely individualized and also suggestive of playing to type through gesture and sartorial semiotics, the portraits can recall early Cindy Sherman, as well as Chuck Close and Robert Longo in their colossal scale and medium. The near-silvery chiaroscuro can also suggest mirror reflections—ghostly stand-ins and doppelgängers hedging viewer space. Collectively, as far as content, Hoppe conveys an absorption with the pleasures and vicissitudes of surface celebrity on the edge of the avant-garde.

An exhibition of black and white photographic portraits by Hoppe is being exhibited at Howl! (6 East 1st Street; NYC 10003; www.howlarts.org) April 24 – May 21, 2019.