Gagosian Gallery

Completed within the last three years, these oil paintings reflect a shift in both scale and tone from Hodgkin’s earlier work. Among this grouping are the most monumental paintings created by the artist during his five-decade career. Hodgkin’s evocative art may be understood as a distillation of memories and emotions. In this recent body of work, he has introduced a more somber palette to suggest times past and lost friends. The details of the natural world, which function as objective correlatives for tender feelings, are recorded through an abstraction of visual language.

Born in London in 1932, Hodgkin was evacuated to the United States during the war, where he lived on Long Island from 1940 to 1943. During these formative years, Hodgkin resolved to become an artist, and he later received his art training from the Camberwell School of Art and the Bath Academy of Art, Corsham. In 1984, he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale and in the following year won the Turner Prize. He was knighted in 1992, and he had a major retrospective at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in 1995, which traveled through 1997 to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Kunstverein fur die Rheinlände und Westfalen in Düsseldorf, and the Hayward Gallery in London.

This is Hodgkin’s second solo exhibition at the Gagosian Galleries since 1998. A variation of the exhibition was presented at Gagosian’s Chelsea location in New York during the fall of 2003. Ken Johnson of The New York Times described the work as having “raucous energy,” “moments of luminous beauty,” and produced in “bouts of feverish inspiration.” ‘