Howard Hodgkin: Absent Friends

Description

Hodgkin's art can be seen as providing memorials for people, many of whom are friends, whose absence is countered by th e corresponding physical presence of particular paintings. Descriptive elements visible in his earlier portraits from the 1950s are subsumed within paintings that have, over the course of more than fifty years, become more psychologically charged, but no l ess connected with evoking specific individuals in particular situations. This book, like the exhibition it accompanies, surveys the development of Hodgkin's portraiture from its beginnings in 1949 to the present, including new paintings. Comprising key works from a range of international public and private collections, it traces the evolution of the artist's visual language and his engagement with a range of friends and others within the artist's circle. Exhibition curator Paul Moorhouse provides a compe lling introduction to Hodgkin's portraits, his subjects, working methods, the role of memory, and his distinctive approach to representing people. Peter Blake, Stephen Buckley, Patrick Caulfield, David Hockney, Philip King, R . B . Kitaj and Richard Smith are among the many leading artists portrayed, so that the British art world emerges as the wider subject of Hodgkin's art. The book also contains a fully illustrated chronology and commentaries on individual work

Howard Hodgkin (born 1932) is internationally recognized as one of Britain's leading painters. Hodgkin was awarded the Turner Prize in 1985, a year after representing Great Britain at the Venice Biennale. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held in Europe and the United States, including major retrospectives at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Tate Britain, London.

[Hodgkin takes] painting in a new direction, not completely abstract, nor wholly figurative, but somewhere in between...inside the mind and painted consciousness.--Will Gompertz "BBC News" [The paintings'] tactile richness should just burn into eyes and minds, leaving a trace behind the eyelids, a memory to which we can return. Their energy is enormous, their beauty intense.--Jenny Uglow "New York Review of Books" A wonderful send-off for the man who made colour sing from the canvas.--Mark Hudson "The Daily Telegraph" Challenging our perceptions of what we even consider a portrait, yet also resisting what many misunderstand to be abstract art, Hodgkin's pieces, spanning a 60-year period, explore a language of representation that captures the "emotional response and feeling of memory when we encounter someone, not just the physical experience"--Sarah Bradbury Howard "The Up Coming" Exploding with an extraordinarily vast and experimental colour palette, the carefully constructed portraits ... at a glance certainly look abstract. But on closer inspection, despite a lack of figurative representation, each have a clear subject and evoke the sense of a person or situation as remembered by the painter and hinted at to the world via his art.--Sarah Bradbury Howard "The Up Coming" It's a sonorous, lovingly curated moment that reminds us just how few artists can touch Hodgkin on use of colour.--Katie McCabe "Time Out London" It's full of joy, it's full of happiness, it's full of golden memories and he was someone who really enjoyed the experience of being alive and wanted to celebrate it in painting.--Paul Moorhouse, Curator "Daily Mail" Psychologically charged, autobiographical and enigmatic, here are the moments of a life caught up in the collection of portraits: the ultimate memoir of a brilliant artist.--Sarah Bradbury Howard "The Up Coming" The late artist Howard Hodgkin worked in adventurous abstract realms but he always used real subject matter as his starting point, as this illuminating collection of his portraits shows.--Matthew Collings "The Evening Standard" We've got the very first painting he ever made, and the last painting he made, and so the entire career is now framed.--Paul Moorhouse, Curator "The Guardian"