| Great Britain |
Born in London in 1932.
Howard Hodgkin is English painter, printmaker and collector. From 1949 to 1954, he studied at the Camberwell School of Art in London and at the Bath Academy of Art in Corsham, where he lectured until 1966. In that year, Hodgkin was given a position at the Chelsea School of Art in London. He taught there until 1972. Hodgkin represented Great Britain at the Biennale in Venice in 1984 and roused international interest with his strong, vivid paintings and drawings. In 1985, the Tate Gallery in London put on the first retrospective of Hodgkin’s works. In the same year, the artist was awarded the Turner Prize. Hodgkin received the Shakespeare Prize in 1997 and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Oxford University in 2000.
Hodgkin’s paintings are generally small in scale, consciously conceived within the tradition of European easel painting. He paints extremely slowly, sometimes taking up to four years or more on one work. During this process the clarity of the original imagery was often obscured, and the spectator was invited to decipher the finished image as a kind of riddle. Hogkin was always concerned to make the picture an object, and from 1970 he worked not on canvas but on assertive wooden supports, such as drawing boards or door frames.
In the 1970s Hodgkin’s work, which was often mentioned in conjunction with the French painter Henri Matisse, shifted from a collaged geometric flatness to a more complex fluid patterning. He applied a restricted range of simple shapes and marks to a variety of moods: lyrical and poetic, or openly erotic. Parallel with the painting Hodgkin worked with the same intensity on large format lithographs and etchings.
We present artwork signed by Howard Hodgkin included in the collection of MoCA:
Untitled, 1986, color etching on paper, 47,5×64,5cm
