Howard Hodgkin

Howard Hodgkin's art was a slow, deliberate combustion. He worked not from life, but from the vivid residue of experience—a conversation, a room's atmosphere, a specific emotional charge. Rejecting the cool intellectualism of much mid-century abstraction, his paintings are sensual and deeply personal. He built them up over years, layer upon layer of lush, gestural color applied not just to the canvas but across the frame itself, making the object a complete, saturated entity. While often grouped with abstract expressionists, Hodgkin saw himself as a painter of representational pictures; the subject was the memory, and the color was its language. His success on the international stage, including winning the Turner Prize in 1985 and representing Britain at the Venice Biennale, affirmed the power of his deeply felt, visually opulent approach. In his later years, even as his health declined, the work grew in scale and boldness, a final, glorious explosion of remembered sensation.