Dennis Hopper & the New Hollywood

This fascinating insight into one of the most eclectic careers in Hollywood spans over forty years of work on the big screen and beyond. Dennis Hopper―a rebel with a cause called New Holly‑‑ wood. The road movie Easy Rider (1969) was a huge commercial hit and a seminal film for the American new wave. In Hopper’s United States, rock music met with pop art, realism cohabited with psychedelic experience, and the producer-driven Hollywood of old caved in to the demands of a new generation. An icon for the greatest film directors of modern times (Coppola, Peckinpah, Altman, Wenders, Lynch, Ferrara), Dennis Hopper has always kept one foot in the anti-establishment, but the other in mainstream cinema and television series. A true chameleon, he has crossed the borders of fiction and reality, art and cinema. This work, accompanying an exhibition at ACMI in Melbourne from November 2009 through January 2010, showcases masterpieces from Dennis Hopper’s collection that encapsulate the American counterculture of the last forty years. From Andy Warhol to Ed Ruscha, from Roy Lichtenstein to Jean-Michel Basquiat, the selection, which also includes a number of Hopper’s own paintings and photographs, brings to light the relationship between Hopper’s artwork and his cinematographic career.