This is the first exhibition of portraits by Howard Hodgkin (1932-2017), one of Britain’s greatest artists. Hodgkin’s paintings are characterised by rich colour, complex illusionistic space and sensuous brushwork. By emphasising these pictorial elements, his work frequently appears entirely abstract. However, over the course of 65 years, a principal concern of Hodgkin’s art has been to evoke a human presence.
The role of memory, the expression of emotion, and the exploration of relationships between people and places are all preoccupations. The exhibition explores Hodgkin’s development of a personal visual language of portraiture, which challenges traditional forms of representation.
Hodgkin’s art can be seen as providing memorials for people, many of whom are friends, whose absence is countered by the 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 less connected with evoking specific individuals in particular situations.
Howard Hodgkin: Absent Friends is at the National Portrait Gallery, London until 18 June.
