Howard Hodgkin: Absent Friends - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1855147556 ISBN 13: 9781855147553

Publisher: National Portrait Gallery, 2017

Synopsis

A full retrospective on the beloved British abstract colorist, from the '50s to the present

“I am a representational painter, but not a painter of appearances,” the beloved British artist Howard Hodgkin once wrote. “I paint representational pictures of emotional situations.” As Hodgkin’s paintings have become more psychologically charged over the course of more than 50 years, straightforwardly descriptive elements that were present in his early portraits have come to be disguised and subsumed in paintings that still endeavor to evoke specific individuals in particular situations.

Howard Hodgkin: Absent Friends 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, this volume traces the evolution of the artist’s visual language and his engagement with a range of friends and others within the artist’s circle. Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield, David Hockney, R.B. Kitaj and Richard Smith are among the many artists portrayed, so that the British art world emerges as the wider subject of Hodgkin’s portraiture.

About this title

About the Author

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.

Review

[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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

[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)

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)

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)

A wonderful send-off for the man who made colour sing from the canvas. (Mark Hudson The Daily Telegraph)

Edition details

• Publisher: National Portrait Gallery
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1855147556
• ISBN 13: 9781855147553
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 216