I am a representational painter, not a painter of appearances

(Howard Hodgkin)

Gagosian is pleased to present “In the Pink,” recent paintings by Howard Hodgkin. This is his first exhibition in Hong Kong.

One of Britain's most celebrated living painters with a career spanning more than fifty years, Hodgkin’s intimate oil on wood-panel paintings convey the relationship between hand, eye, and memory that charges process, visual structure, and emotional temperature.

Hodgkin's compositions are distinctive for the ways in which abstraction and representation, narrative and pure sensation, past and present are brought into urgent relation. Intimate, thoughtful, and insightful, his paintings suggest great arcs of time and thought.

With paint strokes of varying depth and vigor, his works convey fleeting private moments and intense recollections. Now (2015–16) embodies an interchange between light and dark, time and feeling; while Always Afternoon (2016) transforms a temporal memory into an experience of pure and exuberant color. The layered greens and yellows of Don’t Tell a Soul (2016) elide the weight of hours with an emotional jolt; while In the Pink (2008–14) typifies Hodgkin's approach to what James Lawrence calls his “idiosyncratic assemblage of readings or misreadings.” Completed between 2014 and 2016, each painting creates a pocket of time and silence, demonstrating afresh the expressiveness, candor, and mastery of a painter in his prime.

A fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by James Lawrence will accompany the exhibition.

Howard Hodgkin was born in London in 1932, where he lives and works. He attended Camberwell School of Art and the Bath Academy of Art, Corsham. Major museum exhibitions include “Howard Hodgkin: Paintings 1975–1995,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, (1995, traveled to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; Kunstverein Düsseldorf, and Hayward Gallery, London in 1996); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2006, traveled to Tate Britain and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid); “Paintings: 1992–2007,” Yale Center for British Art, New Haven (2007, traveled to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge); “Time and Place, 2001–2010,” Museum of Modern Art Oxford (2010, traveled to De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art, Tilburg, The Netherlands, and San Diego Museum of Art, 2010–11); “Howard Hodgkin,” Fondation Bemberg, Toulouse, France (2013); and “Made in Mumbai,” Curator’s Gallery at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, Mumbai (2016). Major exhibitions of Hodgkin's work will be presented at the National Portrait Gallery, London, in March 2017 and Hepworth Wakefield, England, in June 2017. Gagosian has represented Hodgkin since 1998 and has presented numerous exhibitions of his work in Europe and the U.S.