LONDON, June 2 (Xinhua) -- An exhibition of Howard Hodgkin's final works was presented to the public this week at Gagosian Gallery here, in accordance with the late British artist's wishes.
The exhibition, which is called Last Paintings, includes the final six paintings that Hodgkin completed in India prior to his death in March 2017, five of which will be exhibited for the first time. The exhibition includes more than twenty other paintings never before exhibited in Europe.
As one of Britain's most celebrated contemporary painters, Hodgkin composed powerful, expressive works that, while nominally abstract, bring representation, gesture, and affect into relationship.
Gagosian's director Robin Vousden told Xinhua they wanted to show the very last painting of Hodgkin's life in their gallery space.
"Hodgkin's painting is about memory. The way he evokes memory is to create complex, satisfying spaces, it's like a series of windows, but not just into the landscape but into the past and into the memory of feelings and people and places."
In 1972, Hodgkin stopped working on canvas and began painting on wooden panels and frames, some new and others sourced secondhand in India and Europe. The grain of the wood and the scars and scratches became integral to the paintings, affirming their physical presence and heft. Last Paintings attests to the immediacy of Hodgkin's methods, as well as his intuitive understanding of the relationship between hand, eye and memory.
The earliest work in the exhibition, "And the Skies Are Not Cloudy All Day" (2007 -08) is nearly three meters wide, and painted on unprimed plywood. The title evokes the connection between nature and human temperament, allowing their respective fluctuations to unfold gradually as though over the course of an entire day. On closer inspection, the grain of the plywood beneath the paint emerges as a faint rhythmic pulse.
Toward the end of his life, Hodgkin applied fewer layers of paint to his panels, leaving more of the wood exposed, as if in visible dialogue with the paint. "Now" (2015 -16) is an interchange between light and dark, time and feeling, where the natural streaks of the wood are left bare.
As Hodgkin's urge to substantiate what is essentially transient became ever more pressing, his art became less about retrospection or the remembrance of images past.
His final large-scale painting, "Portrait of the Artist Listening to Music" (2011-16), previously seen only in his solo exhibition Absent Friends at the National Portrait Gallery in London last year, exemplifies his focus on the intangibility of thoughts, feelings, and fleeting private moments.
The layers of paint of "Don't Tell a Soul" (2016) seem to elicit an explicit recollection or excitation in the rapid brushstrokes applied to the lower right corner.
Hodgkin fully embraced the use of time as a compositional element. His paintings were often painted over months and years, the brushwork itself the final definitive step in long processes of reflection and deliberation.
In images that melt away and then regain shape before the viewer's eyes, Hodgkin makes material the irresolute dynamics of time and emotion, and the glancing, immaterial qualities of daily experience.
Hodgkin was born in London in 1932, and passed away in 2017. He was made CBE in 1977, knighted in 1992, and made a Companion of Honor in 2003.
He was awarded the Turner Prize in London in 1985, the Shakespeare Prize in Hamburg in 1997, an honorary DLitt by the University of Oxford in 2000, and the first Swarovski Whitechapel Gallery Art Icon award in 2014.
