Inman Gallery is pleased to present Maggie Hills: Hopscotch, on view March 28 – May 9, 2026. Please join us for an exhibition walkthrough with the artist on Saturday, March 28 at 1pm, followed by an opening reception 2–4pm. This event celebrates concurrent exhibitions by Tommy Fitzpatrick and Jim Richard, with all three artists in attendance.
Maggie Hills paints gestural figures in hazy spaces, capturing the weighty significance of fleeting moments and chance encounters. Intimate in scale, each painting presents a stratigraphy of soft colors and layered patterns to create dreamlike scenes for the viewer to gaze into. The formal complexity allows for rich interiority as the works reveal themselves slowly – both in their viewing and their making – asking us to linger and explore.
Embedded in Hills’ practice is a preliminary act of looking. Collections of found imagery sourced from TV shows, family archives, internet screenshots, daily wanderings become scaffolding of her subject matter. Rather than direct reproductions, these references appear as fragmented motifs mashed together, continually made anew as she builds up the surface. Collage becomes an important critical lens, both as a mode of conceptual synthesis and an occasional technique. Recorded and transposed, Hills works and reworks a canvas, sometimes over years, rendering the initial source material unrecognizable in the process. As such, her final composition is not premeditated but rather revealed though the act of painting itself.
The title Hopscotch centers play as a generative act of making, hinting to the artist’s process of trying and rearranging motifs and marks to arrive at a final composition. It also offers us a way of experiencing the installation itself. The aspect ratio and scale of each work, reminiscent of individual hopscotch squares, invites us to bounce in and out of a painting from one scene to the next. Even the gameplay of hopscotch – the act of tossing a stone for direction of where to jump – gives agency to a fleeting moment, allowing spontaneity to guide the next move.
Hills writes:
“In a world where experiences often seem fleeting, and it frequently feels as if we are wading through a miasma of visual information, I see my process of using the ephemera I have found or saved as a way of holding onto chance encounters and trying to make sense of them. In painting them, their function is re-purposed, and their meaning and value re-assessed. The transient or accidental is transformed into something tangible and timeless, the simple or banal becomes multi-layered and ambiguous, and the generic becomes personal.”
Maggie Hills (b. 1968, Pimu, DR Congo) received an MA in Fine Art from University of Edinburgh (1992) and an MA in Drawing and Painting from Edinburgh College of Art (1994). Select solo exhibitions include: This moment is not important but it’s all there is, A_PLACE, Glasgow (2023); Maggie Hills: Used Paintings, Bill’s Junk, Houston, US (2019); Blunderland, Optical Project, Houston (2008). Select group exhibitions include: Domus Meus, Paul Smith Space, London (2024); Between Two Moons, No31 Gallery, Duns, Scottish Borders (2024); Opening, A_PLACE Gallery, Glasgow, (2023); Art School, Gallery 46, Whitechapel, London (2023); Learning by Doing, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2008). She has been the recipient of the SUPERDEALS Brussels Artist Residency (2025); Creative Scotland Open Funding Award (2025); VACMA Award, Glasgow Life / Creative Scotland (2019); Artist in Residence, Durham Cathedral, (2004); Artist in Residence, Core Program, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1997-99). Hills lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland.
