Art Gallery: Howard Hodgkin - Time and Place

Howard Hodgkin is unquestionably the grand figure of British non-figurative painting. Often compared to Matisse in his use of intense colour, he has always insisted that his paintings are not abstract. They allude, he says, to memories of people and places and states of being, so that his titles are what you would expect from a landscape artist or even, occasionally, a chronicler of modern manners: Dirty Weather, Spring Rain, Privacy and Self Expression in the Bedroom. And he often paints on unconventional surfaces, favouring wood rather than canvas, painting the frame so that we see the paintings more as objects than as two-dimensional surfaces. Tate Britain’s major 2006 retrospective surveyed his work over six decades, but a new exhibition, at Modern Art Oxford, is a tightly focused affair: paintings executed by the 77-year-old artist over the last decade, including a body of new work. They offer a window on to a brilliant, colour-saturated world.

Howard Hodgkin is unquestionably the grand figure of British non-figurative painting. Often compared to Matisse in his use of intense colour, he has always insisted that his paintings are not abstract. They allude, he says, to memories of people and places and states of being, so that his titles are what you would expect from a landscape artist or even, occasionally, a chronicler of modern manners: Dirty Weather, Spring Rain, Privacy and Self Expression in the Bedroom. And he often paints on unconventional surfaces, favouring wood rather than canvas, painting the frame so that we see the paintings more as objects than as two-dimensional surfaces. Tate Britain’s major 2006 retrospective surveyed his work over six decades, but a new exhibition, at Modern Art Oxford, is a tightly focused affair: paintings executed by the 77-year-old artist over the last decade, including a body of new work. They offer a window on to a brilliant, colour-saturated world.