TO THE LIMIT
The Painting of Howard Hodgkin
An article by Isabelle Bonzom
First published in 2010 on the Culture&Cie website in conjunction with a visit to Hodgkin’s exhibition at the De Pont Museum in Tilburg, the Netherlands, “Time and Place”, a travelling exhibition that was also shown in Oxford, United Kingdom, and San Diego, United States:
Howard Hodgkin’s fame spans the Anglo-Saxon countries and various European nations such as Italy and Spain. However, this admirer of Degas, Vuillard and Bonnard has had but one solo exhibition that took place in 1990 at the Fine Arts Museum on Nantes*. The French public has virtually no knowledge of his oeuvre. The show at De Pont Museum in Tilburg was an opportunity for the Dutch, Belgians and the French to discover Hodgkin’s work. Artist and Art historian Isabelle Bonzom has met Howard Hodgkin on two occasions at his London studio. In this article, she presents the English painter’s work.
“All my pictures are about emotion, aroused by anything from a love affair to the view out of a window.”
Howard Hodgkin
To The Limit
Howard Hodgkin has been close to the British Pop Art movement. A friend of Kitaj, he has shown his work alongside Hockney and Blake while being viewed as an “outsider” by art critics as well as by himself. His work, then already on the margins yet quickly noticed, has remained profoundly original. Hodgkin plows his path deep in the ground and with determination.
As soon as the end of the 1950’s and during the next decade, the artist forges a vocabulary that he continues to explore today. That vocabulary comprises of motifs (points and stripes), of juxtapositions and superpositions of colored planes. In the early years, he deals with the figure through the portrait, but the body appears tight and uptight, and absorbed by the predominance of colors and decorative patterns. Since 1969, Hodgkin takes the frame into account, integrating it as a major component of his paintings. Little by little, he also begins painting on wood. He recovers cutting boards, tables and doors as well as actual frames that he combines and on which he paints.
Is the painting a window or a table? Both, Hodgkin replies. It is a painting, an object, not an illusion. The painter underlines its materiality: he leaves bare the texture of the wood, paints over the frame. For it is the edge that is of interest to him, the limits of the frame and image. He marks, covers up or deletes the borders between the exterior and the interior of the frame and image. Inner spaces and landscapes. Outside and inside the body.
A breaker wave as a dazzling vision where the image seems to surge from the surface of the support.
At 50-years old, Hodgkin sees his work and career blossom considerably.
He represents England at the Venice Biennale in 1984. He is awarded the prestigious Turner Price the next year. The American scene was already favorable to the British artist, yet in 1995, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened a retrospective of his work. Gagosian, one of the most prominent American galleries, has been representing Hodgkin since 1998.
His painting expands and becomes more gestural. Year after year, the artist moves toward more flexibility. Decorative patterns jostle together, bodies are more supple and suggested.
Hodgkin practices splits and cultivates paradoxes. He excels at vertiginous changes of scale, from a very small sized painting to a monumental one. The palette is constantly intensifying, to a point where it creates unexpected, strident or precious relations between colors. Color itself can be wild, dirty and lush. At any time, Hodgkin risks bad taste, yet often reaches the sublime. His striking art is together subtle, blazing and raw.
Cellular Memory
Nothing is narrative in this extremely present painting. Still, the subject of these paintings is triggered by emotions, the result of sensorial reactions to encounters in various places, whether gardens, restaurants, museums or bedrooms. Hodgkin’s relationship to the other and to his environment is incorporated into his memory and looks projected through the screen-skin of his painting that he fleshes out with time. Inner visions, lived experiences are emerging on the surface of the painting and make it vibrate. Hodgkin expresses an organic and cellular universe of mutations and possibilities.
His painting is made of concentration and expansion. It feels fresh as if Hodgkin were laying it bare. Hodgkin proposes a world related to the very physics of paint, carnal and flavorful.
Isabelle Bonzom, 2010
Read other articles by Isabelle Bonzom, including her essay on the sculpted ensemble by Eric Fischl, "Ten Breaths"
* After 22 years of absence, the painting of Howard Hodgkin was finally shown again in France, in 2013 at the Fondation Bemberg, as part of the Toulouse Biennial, " Artist comes first". The Gagosian gallery in Paris is curating a solo show of his work from June to August 2014.
Visit the official site of Howard Hodgkin
