Howard Hodgkin

Howard Hodgkin 1932 London - 2017 London Painter and printmaker Howard Hodgkin, full honorary name Sir Gordon Howard Eliot Hodgkin, CH, CBE, is one of the most renowned contemporary artists in the UK. Born in London on August 6, 1932, Howard Hodgkin spent the years 1940-1943 on Long Island, USA during World War II. It was to be a formative period, as it was here that his early desire to become a painter was solidified by visits to the Museum of Modern Art in nearby New York and his intense study of the art on display. In 1949/50 Howard Hodgkin attended the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in London, after which he studied at the Bath Academy of Arts in Corsham. 1954-1956 he taught himself at Charterhouse School in Surrey, 1956-1966 also at Bath Academy in Corsham. From 1966 to 1972 Howard Hodgkin was a teacher at the Chelsea School of Art in London. His first solo exhibition took place in 1962 at the Arthur Tooth and Sons Gallery in London, and his career was slow to take off. The breakthrough comes in 1984, when Howard Hodgkin represents Great Britain at the Venice Biennale. The exhibition "Forty Paintings" in 1985 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London made Howard Hodgkin finally known and world famous, in the same year he also received the Turner Prize. Painting in Search of Memories Howard Hodgkin's paintings are abstract worlds of color, oil paint painted on wood or canvas in seemingly spontaneous brushstrokes that seek to capture the feeling of the moment. Just as the writer Marcel Proust uses the taste of a madeleine pastry to trace the memories of childhood, Howard Hodgkin uses color to try to preserve and evoke memories of experiences in his paintings whenever they are looked at. In doing so, the artist reveals a great sensitivity to the ability of color to convey emotion. "I paint representational pictures of emotional situations," Howard Hodgkin says of his painting. Evocative titles help to steer the memory in the right direction. They are autobiographical abstractions that Howard Hodgkin depicts, but they are also traceable to any sensitive viewer who engages with them. The ostensibly spontaneous depiction is preceded by careful, precise, and deliberate work on the part of the painter, who sometimes spends years completing a work until it reaches its final level of condensation. A particular characteristic of Howard Hodgkin's paintings is that he often incorporates the picture frame into his paintings, allowing the paint to extend beyond the canvas, the wooden surface, or purposefully allowing wide swaths of paint to form this frame at the edges. Thus, the pictorial worlds within often appear still emphasized framed: the framing surrounds the window of memory. In addition to the painterly, an extensive graphic œuvre is created, whose vibrant color tones are in no way inferior to the expressive power of his paintings. Moments of Life Captured in Paintings In 1995/96, the Metropolitan Museum in New York organized Howard Hodgkin's first solo exhibition in the USA, which was also shown at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas, as well as at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf and at the Hayward Gallery in London. From 1998 Howard Hodgkin is represented by Gagosian. The first broad retrospective is organized by Tate Britain in London in 2006, which travels on to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. The important British artist has been awarded the highest honors of his fatherland, becoming Commander of the British Empire (CBE) as early as 1977, knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1992, and Companion of Honour (CH) in 2003. The National Portrait Gallery is presenting a fascinating exhibition in 2017 with "Absent Friends," which focuses attention on Howard Hodgkin's unorthodox portraiture, as the paintings do not actually feature figuratively recognizable people, but rather each portrait depiction is based as much on emotions and tonalities of memory of encounters with a particular person. For this exhibition, Howard Hodgkin painted the magnificent self-portrait titled "Portrait of the Artist Listening to Music" - it was to be his last painting, as Howard Hodgkin died in London on March 9, 2017, two weeks before the opening of this exhibition.