Upcoming Exhibition

Howard Hodgkin: Large Prints

19 January – 13 March 2027

In a career lasting more than 50 years, the artist Howard Hodgkin (1932–2017) made over 200 prints, experimenting with a wide range of techniques such as lithography, silkscreen and etching.

In the early 1990s he began working with master printer Jack Shirreff at 101 Workshop in Wiltshire, and it was there that he discovered carborundum intaglio and sugar-lift aquatint, often combined with hand-painting; from that point until his death in 2017, this combination of mediums became his preferred technique for making prints. The rich, textured surface combined with the painterly finish proved to be the perfect vehicle through which his imagery could be translated into editioned form.

Both in his prints and paintings, Hodgkin explored numerous themes: claustrophobic interiors, sometimes peopled with intimate friends; views from windows and places visited such as India, Morocco and Italy; the weather, the seasons, gardens, fruit, flowers and trees. Working from memory and imagination, he created images of transience, in which ambiguous, dissolving forms are the pictorial equivalent of an autobiographical experience or sensation.

Carborundum intaglio also offered Hodgkin the ability to work in scale, and this exhibition focuses on a selection of his monumental prints, including Morning and Night from his Venetian Views series (1995), and Attack (2012), in which the sheer energy of the hand-painting dominates the composition. Their scale and explosive bursts of colour are closer to gestural abstraction, or action painting, than printmaking.

Masterpieces of heightened, sensuous colour, Hodgkin’s prints continue to astonish, move and delight ten years after his death.

Opening times

19 January – 13 March 2027

Open
Monday to Friday 2–4 pm; Saturday 2–6 pm

Closed
Sunday

Information for visitors

• To access the exhibition, please call in via the Porter’s Lodge on Magdalene Street.
• Entrance will be to the Gallery only.
• Visitors are kindly requested not to enter any other areas of the New Library.

Image credit

Attack. Courtesy of the artist and Cristea Roberts Gallery, London © Howard Hodgkin.

Night Palm. Courtesy of the artist and Cristea Roberts Gallery, London © Howard Hodgkin.