Howard Hodgkin

Galleria Lawrence Rubin, Milan
Through May 4

English artist Howard Hodgkin is one of the most sensitive and refined artists of his generation. Portrayed by writer-friend Bruce Chatwin, he appears as a singular, psychologically complex personality. Chatwin underlines the deep originality of his painting, which does not sit comfortably in any artistic category. In Italy, his work has been displayed only once before—in the British pavilion at the 1984 Venice Biennale.

The paintings he has produced over the last decade are characterized by prevalently material and gestural tendencies, their broad brushstrokes laden with dramatic expression. Nonetheless, Hodgkin’s painting cannot be considered informal, because its initial impulse always comes from highly suggestive instances or emotions rooted in reality. These are then re-elaborated and reinvented via a slow, carefully meditated process in which memory-banked personal feelings and sentiments are decanted.

The references to actual experiences might be a landscape glimpsed through a window, a journey in India, a holiday memory, a still life, or, such as in the painting The Japanese Screen (1962-1963), a simple object. At times the viewer meets with allusions to images from art history that have particularly caught the artist’s attention. One particular characteristic of Hodgkin’s work is his choice of support.

The artist always works on wooden panels, which he recuperates from a variety of sources, ranging from wardrobes to actual doors, such as that used for Stormy Weather, the largest painting in the exhibition, which took an years to complete (1993-2001). By choosing this kind of support, the pieces take on a highly tangible dimension, an obvious physicality that serves as a contrast to the suggestive nature of the pictorial composition.




Francesco Poli
Translation by Rosalind Furness