Howard Hodgkin: Memories: Paintings 1978-1999

This exhibition is devoted to the art of Howard Hodgkin (1932-2017), who is widely regarded as one of the leading British painters of the last fifty years. Described by the eminent art critic Robert Hughes as ‘a colourist unsurpassed among living painters’, during a seventy-year career Hodgkin forged a deeply personal visual language in which colour, brushwork and mark-making evoke memories and their associated emotions.  Bringing together nineteen of the artist’s most distinctive paintings, Howard Hodgkin: Memories focuses on the 1980s and 1990s, two decades during which Hodgkin’s art attained the stylistic maturity and expressive vitality that secured international recognition.

During this ‘classic’ phase in Hodgkin’s development, he received a succession of important honours.  In 1984, he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale; the following year he won the Turner Prize; and in 1992 he was knighted.  This recognition followed a period of several years during which Hodgkin had searched with difficulty for an effective way of working.  ‘I had terrible trouble finding a way of painting’, he recalled. ‘To some extent I found my voice early and knew what I wanted to do. But knowing how to do it took longer.’ 

The exhibition illuminates the way forward that Hodgkin eventually found, and the wide-ranging nature of his subject matter, which he described as ‘views through windows, landscapes, even occasionally a still-life, to memories of holidays, encounters with interiors and art collections, other people, other bodies, love affairs, sexual encounters and emotional situations of all kinds, even including eating’.  These subjects provided the context for the ‘emotional situations’ that Hodgkin recalled in paintings of compelling expressive presence.

- Paul Moorhouse