Howard Hodgkin

Howard Hodgkin (1932 – 2017) was one of Britain’s leading contemporary artists. His vibrantly colourful works always oscillate between ­figuration and abstraction; they visualise and evoke feelings and memories. 

 

Motifs tend to be embedded in Hodgkin’s pictorial structures. He often created additional levels consisting of lines of wide brush strokes or splashes of colour, which inscribe themselves as texture. Spontaneously placed, in various colours and with some overlapping, the splashes create several visually superimposed grids that give great depth to his compositions.

 

In the late 1970s Hodgkin embarked on printmaking. Many series document his endeavour to push the boundaries of this genre and to combine printing and painting techniques. His innovative contribution to printmaking was to treat hand colouration as an integral element of the printing process where it usually occurs at the end. Hodgkin, how­ever, had increasingly integrated colouration at various ­stages of the process. His hand-painted prints acquire a more voluptuous texture, with the paint’s gleam producing an oscillation between visual levels.

 

Hodgkin had created an autonomous print cycle. Inspired by posters he designed, among others, his large-scale palm images. He had developed emblems in a bold formal idiom that exude an exotic atmosphere. A comprehensive catalogue raisonné on Howard Hodgkins’ printed oeuvre, edited by Liesbeth Heenk and Nan Rosenthal, was published by Thames & Hudson in 2003.