“I am a representational painter, but not a painter of appearances,” the beloved British artist Howard Hodgkin once wrote. “I paint representational pictures of emotional situations.” As Hodgkin’s paintings have become more psychologically charged over the course of more than 50 years, straightforwardly descriptive elements that were present in his early portraits have come to be disguised and subsumed in paintings that still endeavor to evoke specific individuals in particular situations.
Howard Hodgkin: Absent Friends surveys the development of Hodgkin’s portraiture from its beginnings in 1949 to the present, including new paintings. Comprising key works from a range of international public and private collections, this volume traces the evolution of the artist’s visual language and his engagement with a range of friends and others within the artist’s circle. Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield, David Hockney, R.B. Kitaj and Richard Smith are among the many artists portrayed, so that the British art world emerges as the wider subject of Hodgkin’s portraiture.
Howard Hodgkin (born 1932) is internationally recognized as one of Britain’s leading painters. Hodgkin was awarded the Turner Prize in 1985, a year after representing Great Britain at the Venice Biennale. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held in Europe and the United States, including major retrospectives at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Tate Britain, London.
