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Howard Hodgkin, 'Lovers', 1984-1994

 


With an idiosyncratic artistic practice which defies artistic categorisation, Howard Hodgkin's Lovers was eight years in the making. It bleeds out of its dark frame towards a viewer, illustrating a swirling motion of vivid reds and greens which cannot be controlled. Towards the left-hand side of his panel, the artist has captured a more humanised form; a figure in orange curled in a fetal position and protected by the nest of colour illustrated on the opposite side. Perhaps, Hodgkin suggests another example of human love here, through the allusion to comfort, safety and protection. Opposite, he captures untameable human emotion with single sweeps of brushwork, firstly in red, then in green, then red again, exploding outwards with yearning and urgency. 

Running away from school to pursue his artistic career, Hodgkin went on to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale, whilst he also won the Turner Prize and earned himself a knighthood. However, he never attached himself to an artistic school or movement, he often struggles to complete works and he offers us very little in the way of preliminary material. Compositions are instead worked out in his head and are steeped in uncertainty. Although his style is distinct in its choices of vivid tones, its neglect of the controlling frame and its presentation of human experience in a uniquely abstract guise, Hodgkin himself often spoke of the 'unquenchable envy' he felt towards artists 'who can repeat themselves'. The themes he chooses to evoke often revolve around memory and life, including the artist's own experiences where colour defines these works, coming to represent memory, passion, sexuality, society, climate, travel experiences, feeling. Fundamentally, art allows Hodgkin to push beyond all the possibilities of figurative representation. 

In Lovers, the striking palette retains its freshness and rawness through Hodgkin's techniques, where previous shapes are covered by new ones. This is particularly noticeable on the largest red arc, where the boundary has become blurred through layers, and subsequently beyond the panel in an illustration of the waves of emotion. Here, red and green illustrate love - red, with its raw passionate and sexual connotations is an obvious choice, but green is more difficult to decipher. Whilst it does have associations with love in some cultures (Hindu and Buddhist, for example), it could also link to the life cycle, or even fertility. This harks back to Hodgkin's fetal figure, perhaps the child nestled in its mother's womb as another example of love. Or, perhaps it represents the combining of two figures, reminiscent of, for instance, Titian's charcoal drawing of A Couple in Embrace, now in the Fitzwilliam Museum. For Hodgkin, however, it is not just colour and form that drive his artworks, but materiality. He described them as 'objects' and in his all-white studio without windows, painting was allowed to take on a life of its own, extending beyond the frame, bleeding out into our world and pulling us into its emotional depths. Hodgkin always appreciated the unfinished canvas and chose to exhibit these panel paintings 'because I'm uncertain as to how to go on'. 

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