For her ‘Life Imitating Art‚’ series, Jeanette Lowe tells Stephanie McBride that she looked at scenes in Dublin as Edward Hopper might and created images using him as her influence
In March, when American writer Michael Tisserand tweeted: ‘We are all Edward Hopper paintings now‚’, social media quickly adopted Hopper as the artist of the lockdown. From WhatsApp to Instagram, Tisserand’s compilation of four Hopper images of lone figures launched a whirligig of responses and memes.
Irish artist Jeanette Lowe’s long-running ‘Life Imitating Art‚’ series also adopts Hopper in a creative, localised way. Featuring in the Irish Embassy’s recent ‘Ireland in Frame‚’ group exhibition in various locations around Berlin, her series re-imagines Dublin streetscapes to make them familiar yet strange through her own creative geography. ‘I set out to look at scenes in Dublin as Edward Hopper might and to see what I would have to do to create images using him as my influence,‚’ she says.
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