ART CITIES:London-Howard Hodgkin
Howard Hodgkin’s work is often recognisable by its small scale, fluid use of colour and evocative forms. He saw his paintings as objects in themselves and consistently stressed the self-sufficiency of his mark making process. He is known to work extremely slowly; often spending up to four or five years on a singular piece.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Gallery Archive
Howard Hodgkin’s work appears to magnify the blurred intersection between time and place, drawing out the resonance of memory. He evokes potent emotions by crystalising points and places in time, using a layering process which seems to emulate concepts of past, present and future. The exhibition “Last Paintings” includes the final six paintings that Howard Hodgkin completed in India prior to his death, in 9/3/2017, five of which are exhibited for the first time, also the exhibition includes more than twenty other paintings, never before exhibited in Europe. Howard Hodgkin’s early works from the 1950s and 1960s include stylized figurative scenes and landscapes, depicting specific emotional experiences and significant personal interactions using his unique visual vocabulary. In 1972 Hodgkin renounced working on canvas in favor of wooden panels and frames, some new and others sourced secondhand in India and Europe. The grain of the wood and the scars and scratches of the supports became integral to the paintings, affirming their physical presence and heft. Last Paintings attests to the immediacy of Hodgkin’s methods, as well as his intuitive understanding of the relationship between hand, eye, and memory. The earliest work in the exhibition, “And the Skies Are Not Cloudy All Day” (2007–08) is nearly three meters in width, and painted on unprimed plywood. The title invokes the connection between nature and the human temperament, allowing their respective fluctuations to unfold gradually as though over the course of an entire day. Toward the end of his life, Hodgkin applied fewer layers of paint to his panels, leaving more of the wooden support exposed, in visible dialogue with the paint. “Now” (2015-16) embodies an interchange between light and dark, time and feeling, where the natural streaks of the wood are left bare. His final large-scale painting, “Portrait of the Artist Listening to Music” (2011-16) exemplifies his focus on the intangibility of thoughts, feelings, and fleeting private moments. The layered greens and yellows of Don’t Tell a Soul (2016) seem to evoke an explicit recollection or excitation in rapid brushstrokes applied to the lower right corner of the support.
Info: Gagosian Gallery, 20 Grosvenor Hill, London, Duration: 1/6-28/7/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.gagosian.com
