Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery

In a career lasting more than 50 years, the painter Howard Hodgkin (1932–2017) made over 200 prints. Many of them were hand-coloured under his supervision by the various printers he worked with so that they come close to being one-offs, like paintings. In both mediums, he explored similar themes: views into claustrophobic interiors, sometimes peopled with intimate friends: places visited such as India, Morocco, and Venice; the weather, the seasons, gardens, fruit, flowers, and trees. Working from memory and imagination, he created images of transience, in which ambiguous, dissolving forms are the pictorial equivalent of an autobiographical experience or sensation.

This major exhibition, switching across the gallery and manor, curated by Richard Calvocoressi, brings together some sixty of Hodgkin’s prints, ranging in date from his witty, pop-art shapes of the 1960s to the freely brushed forms of his final years. Masterpieces of heightened, sensuous colour, Hodgkin’s prints have lost none of their power to astonish, move and delight eight years after his death.