IN THE PINK HOWARD HODGKIN
underage
“In the Pink,” recent paintings by Howard Hodgkin is on show at Gagosian Gallery in Hong Kong. This is his first exhibition in Hong Kong.
I am a representational painter, not a painter of appearances. -- Howard Hodgkin
One of Britain's most celebrated living painters with a career spanning more than fifty years, Hodgkin’s intimate oil on wood-panel paintings convey the relationship between hand, eye, and memory that charges process, visual structure, and emotional temperature. Hodgkin's compositions are distinctive for the ways in which abstraction and representation, narrative and pure sensation, past and present are brought into urgent relation. Intimate, thoughtful, and insightful, his paintings suggest great arcs of time and thought. With paint strokes of varying depth and vigor, his works convey fleeting private moments and intense recollections. Now (2015–16) embodies an interchange between light and dark, time and feeling; while Always Afternoon (2016) transforms a temporal memory into an experience of pure and exuberant color. The layered greens and yellows of Don’t Tell a Soul (2016) elide the weight of hours with an emotional jolt; while In the Pink (2008–14) typifies Hodgkin's approach to what James Lawrence calls his “idiosyncratic assemblage of readings or misreadings.” Completed between 2014 and 2016, each painting creates a pocket of time and silence, demonstrating afresh the expressiveness, candor, and mastery of a painter in his prime. A fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by James Lawrence will accompany the exhibition.
Howard Hodgkin, Now, 2015–16, Oil on wood, 15 1/4 × 18 1/4 inches (38.7 × 46.4 cm)
© Howard Hodgkin Photo by Prudence Cumming Associates LTD