Howard Hodgkin is one of Britain's most admired painters and printmakers of the 20th century. He was an artist who understood the interplay of colour, gesture and ground. Hodgkin's work often refers to memories, emotions and private moments but avoids the illustrational. It borders on the abstract with biomorphic forms. The apparently spontaneous and dramatic brushstrokes provide an exploration into the expressive nature of paint itself. The paintings suggest a swift, brisk way of working through the application of the paint however Hodgkin was a meticulous, exact and precise painter. He often worked on individual paintings for decades at a time often the result of an extensive process of layering and over-painting.
In 1932, Howard Hodgkin was born in London. He attended Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts (1949-50) and then Bath Academy of Art, Corsham (1950-54). Hodgkin never belonged to a particular artistic group or school of thought. Many of his contemporaries were drawn to the School of London or to Pop Art but Hodgkin remained independent and something of an outsider. His first solo exhibition was in 1962 at Arthur Tooth and Sons in London. Two years later he first visited India following his interest in Indian miniatures. Collecting Indian art and miscellanea became a lifelong passion.
Hodgkin's pictures from the sixties experimented with the frame, which was a direct break from American Abstract Expressionism. The brushstrokes often continued beyond the picture plane and onto the frame therefore breaking from traditional confines.
Hodgkin's paintings and prints have been the subject of major exhibitions worldwide. His first retrospective in 1976 was curated by Nicholas Serota at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford. In 1984 Hodgkin represented Britain at the Biennale di Venezia. In 1985 Hodgkin's exhibition Forty Paintings reopened the Whitechapel Gallery, London. In the same year he won the Turner Prize. He served as a trustee of both the Tate and the National Gallery in London and he was knighted in 1992. In 1995 New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art presented a major retrospective which toured Europe and later in 2010 they presented a dedicated prints retrospective. In 1997 he was awarded the Shakespeare Prize in Hamburg. In 2006 Hodgkin's first full retrospective opened at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin and it travelled to Tate Britain, London, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. In 2014 the artist won the first Swarovski Whitechapel Gallery Art Icon award.
Howard Hodgkin designed the set and costumes for several opera and ballet productions including Ballet Rambert, the Royal Ballet and the Mark Morris Dance Group. Hodgkin also designed textiles for the Designers Guild, posters and prints for the Olympic Games, and a millennium stamp for the Royal Mail.
Hodgkin's paintings and prints are held by most major museums including London's British Museum and Tate, New York's Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum, the Carnegie Institute in Pennsylvania, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark.