Artist Showdown

Howard Hodgkin at Gagosian Gallery - London - until May 17

May 17 is the last day of the solo show of Howard Hodgkin at Gagosian Gallery (April 3 -  May 17, 2008). His first show of new work in London since 1999, and his first at the Britannia Street galleries.

Hodgkin’s paintings are unmistakable with their assertive, compressed gestures, brush-swept, complex textures, daring, voluptuous palette, and dynamic interchange of light and dark. The presence of a subject, no matter how hermetic, allusive, or fragmentary, is felt to reside in the heart of each. Hodgkin is an artist who embraces spontaneity and directness in equal measure to the processes of reflection, capitulation, and disguise. Sometimes he will labour for years over what looks like a single brush mark produced in an instant. His pictures, with their incorporated frames and painted wooden supports, behave as both objects and images.

“My pictures are finished when the subject comes back. I start out with the subject, and naturally I have to remember first what it looked like, but it would perhaps also contain a great deal of feeling and sentiment. All that has got to be somehow transmuted, transformed, or made into a physical object, and when that happens, when that’s finally been done, when the last physical marks have been put on and the subject comes back…well, the painting is finished.” Howard Hodgkin

In twenty works completed in 2007 and 2008, Hodgkin explores themes of American freedom and erotic intimacy, successfully engineering the intermarriage of private memories with mainstream abstract painting– “the facts of life as visual art,” as the late Robert Rosenblum once described them. The works vary in scale, although there is a marked preference for the epic, whether in intimate, warmly expressive subjects such as Artist and Model and Blushing, or in bold and exhilarating landscapes, such as the huge, incandescent Where Seldom Is Heard a Discouraging Word and the fiercely rendered Home, Home on the Range.

Howard Hodgkin