Howard Hodgkin · British painter and printmaker

" Hodgkin was born in 1932 in London and studied at the Camberwell School of Art and Bath Academy of Art from 1949 – 54. His work has been shown around the world and is included in many international museum collections. The only previous retrospective of his work was shown in 1976 at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, though major exhibitions of recent works were seen in London at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1985 and at the Hayward Gallery in 1996. His many professional positions have included teaching at Chelsea from 1966 – 72, Trustee of the Tate Gallery 1970 – 76 and of the National Gallery from 1978 – 85. He represented Britain at the 1984 Venice Biennial, was awarded the Turner Prize in 1985 and knighted in 1992.
Although Hodgkin (b.1932) didn’t emerge as a major figure in British art until the 1970s the exhibition begins with paintings from the 1950s, revealing the early development of his singular visual language. The exhibition traces the evolution of his vocabulary through the portraits on canvas of friends and interiors of the 1960s, to his adoption in the mid 1970s of the wooden panel and frame, defining painting as object, and through to the later, looser and more gestural paintings of the 1990s. Displayed broadly chronologically, the exhibition includes a group of Venetian paintings from the 1980s and new work never seen before.

Hodgkin's paintings often seek to convey memories of encounters with friends and frequently carry titles alluding to specific places and events such as Dinner at West Hill (1966) and Goodbye to the Bay of Naples (1980–82). Hodgkin himself has said that he paints "representational pictures of emotional situations".
His prints are hand-painted etchings and he has worked with the same master printer (Jack Shirreff at 107 Workshop) and print publisher (Alan Cristea Gallery) for the last 25 years.Despite their apparent spontaneity and usually small scale, many of Hodgkin's paintings take years to complete, with him returning to a work after a wait and then changing it or adding to it. He often paints over the frames of his pictures, emphasising the idea of the painting as an object. Several of his works are on wooden items, such as bread-boards or the tops of old tables, rather than canvas. A number of his works not shown in frames are surrounded by rectangles of simple colour

Binding together all his work is his consistent exploration of the representation of personal encounters, emotional experience and memories of specific events. Whether trips to India, Egypt or Morocco, social occasions such as dinner with friends, particular moments are simultaneously reconstructed and obscured through a layering of the picture surface with distinct marks and intense colours, often achieved only over a period of several years.While associations have been made to Matisse, Vuillard, Degas and American abstract expressionist painting, as well as Pahari miniature paintings of which the artist is an avid collector through his many trips to India, Hodgkin has continued to forge a strongly independent path, developing a distinctive style.
On 9 March 2017, Hodgkin died peacefully at the age of 84 in a hospital in London. Tributes to Hodgkin were made by several figures in British art, including Tate director Nicholas Serota who described Hodgkin as "one of the great artists and colourists of his generation".(rogallery.com)

Color Field Howard Hodgkin

Sir Gordon Howard Eliot Hodgkin (6 August 1932 – 9 March 2017) was a British painter and printmaker. His work is most often associated with abstraction.
Gordon Howard Eliot Hodgkin was born on 6 August 1932 in Hammersmith, London, the son of Eliot Hodgkin (1905–1973), a manager for the chemical company ICI and a noted amateur horticulturist, and his wife Katherine, a botanical illustrator. During the Second World War, Eliot Hodgkin was an RAF officer, rising to Wing Commander, and was assistant to Sefton Delmer in running his black propaganda campaign against Nazi Germany.His maternal grandfather Gordon Hewart, 1st Viscount Hewart was a journalist, lawyer, MP and Lord Chief Justice; and the scientist Thomas Hodgkin was his great-great-grandfather's older brother.[5] Hodgkin was a cousin of the English still-life painter Eliot Hodgkin (1905–1987)
During the Second World War, Hodgkin was evacuated with his mother and sister to the USA, where they lived on Long Island, New York. On returning, he was educated at Eton College and then at Bryanston School in Dorset.He had decided on a career in art in early childhood and ran away from school to pursue this.
He studied at the Camberwell Art School and later at the Bath Academy of Art in Corsham,where Edward Piper studied drawing under him.

 Hodgkin's first solo show was in London in 1962.
In 1980, Hodgkin was invited by John Hoyland to exhibit work as part of the Hayward Annual at the Hayward Gallery along with Gillian Ayres, Basil Beattie, Terry Setch, Anthony Caro, Patrick Caulfield, Ben Nicholson and others.
In 1984, Hodgkin represented Britain at the Venice Biennale, in 1985 he won the Turner Prize, and in 1992 he was knighted.
In 1995, Hodgkin printed the Venetian Views series, which depict the same view of Venice at four different times of day. Venice, Afternoon – one of the four prints – uses 16 sheets, or fragments, in a hugely complex printing process that creates a colourful, painterly effect. This piece was given to the Yale Centre of British Art in June 2006 by its Israeli family owners in order to complement the museum's already-impressive collection of Hodgkins.
In 2003, he was appointed by Queen Elizabeth II as a Companion of Honour. A major exhibition of his work was mounted at Tate Britain, London, in 2006. Also in 2006, The Independent declared him one of the 100 most influential gay people in Britain, as his work has helped many people express their emotions to others.

 In September 2010, Hodgkin and five other British artists, John Hoyland, John Walker, Ian Stephenson, Patrick Caulfield and R.B. Kitaj, were in an exhibition entitled The Independent Eye: Contemporary British Art From the Collection of Samuel and Gabrielle Lurie, at the Yale Center for British Art.
His prints were hand-painted etchings and he worked with the master printer Jack Shirreff at 107 Workshop.
A feature of his painting was that he made the frame intrinsic to the work " incorporated physically into the painting as part of its making, or created as an illusion to give definition to his subject.Wikipedia