Howard Hodgkin: Paintings 1975-1995 at Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

Howard Hodgkin: Paintings 1975–1995 
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth 
March 31 - July 14, 1996 

The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth will exhibit Howard Hodgkin: Paintings 1975-1995 at the Modern's main location in Fort Worth's Cultural District. This special exhibition, which premiered at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York last November where it was seen by over 144,000 visitors, surveys the achievement over the past 20 years of one of the most important British artists of the postwar era. Consisting of 46 oil paintings borrowed from private and public collections in the United States, Europe and Mexico, this exhibition constitutes the first major museum exhibition of Howard Hodgkin's work in the United States in ten years. The exhibition begins with works from 1975, the year Howard Hodgkin achieved a mature and independent style, and concludes with works recently completed in 1995, including four paintings that have never before been exhibited.

Howard Hodgkin: Paintings 1975-1995 was organized over the course of four years by the Modern Art Museum's Director, Marla Price, in collaboration with the Modern's Chief Curator, Michael Auping. This exhibition focuses on the period of Howard Hodgkin's greatest achievement and places particular emphasis on his paintings from 1985 to 1995.

Howard Hodgkin was born in London, England in 1932. He studied at the Camberwell School of Art, London and the Bath Academy of Art, Corsham, between 1949 and 1954. Even though Hodgkin's early work is associated with the British pop art movement and the School of London, he has always been a strongly independent artist. Howard Hodgkin has stated, "I am a representational painter, but not a painter of appearances. I paint representational appearances of emotional situations." Hodgkin's paintings depict memories of places and encounters; trips to Italy, India or Morocco, interiors of hotels and restaurants, visits with friends and love affairs. The feelings Hodgkin experiences are captured in intense colors; remembered people and objects are transformed into expressive splotches, swirls and blobs of paint, the elements that constitute his own visual vocabulary.

Although Howard Hodgkin's paintings appear spontaneous they are often worked on over extended periods of time. A painting begins when the artist first recalls a particular moment and ends when the subject comes back. Hodgkin describes the artistic process: "I start out with the subject and naturally I have to remember first of all what it looked like, but it would also perhaps contain a great deal of feeling and sentiment. All of that has got to be somehow transmuted, transformed or made into a physical object and when that happens, when that's finally been done, when the last physical marks have been put on and the subject comes back——then the picture's finished and there is no question of doing anything more to it."

The final venue of this exhibition is the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf, Germany (August 17 - October 13, 1996).

A major book documents the exhibition and provides a broad overview of Howard Hodgkin's achievement. Essays by Michael Auping, John Elderfield and noted author Susan Sontag examine various aspects of Hodgkin's work and his importance in postwar twentieth-century art. A catalogue raisonné of all of Hodgkin's oil paintings complements the essays, providing the first scholarly history of his work, beginning with his first paintings in 1948-1949. The catalogue contains eighty color illustrations, an extensive bibliography and an exhibition checklist.

MODERN ART MUSEUM OF FORT WORTH, TEXAS
www.mamfw.org

Updated 23.06.2019