LONDON — Is all of it a bit incongruous? Maybe. The scene that greets my eye on the high of the spiraling staircase of Pitzhanger Manor, as soon as the nation residence of the architect Sir John Soane, constructed on the cusp of the nineteenth century, is a poster on a somewhat fragile-looking easel promoting a present of prints by the late Howard Hodgkin and a full-length bronze statue of Minerva, Roman goddess of commerce.
Minerva is greedy a spear and modeling a helmet. The print, which reveals off a colourful spray of palm fronds, seems to be positively raffish and carefree by comparability. Are they squaring off to one another? Can Howard and his prints really feel at house in a spot like this? Let’s discover out.
The exhibition begins on the bottom ground, in a light-filled gallery area punctuated by three round skylights, made all of the jollier by insets of coloured glass. This gallery — whose dimension jogs my memory of Howard’s outdated studio, a former dairy only a hop, skip, and a bounce away from the glowering facade of the British Museum — stands simply to the suitable of the manor home, related to it by a colonnade. It began life as a kitchen (a lot trendy entertaining went on on this house) and later grew to become a library. Within the Eighties it was became a gallery within the Sir John Soane-ish, late Georgian neoclassical type.
Of the exhibition’s 46 prints, it’s right here that we see the most important single gathering of them, 15 in whole, organized in thematic groupings. The remaining are dispersed throughout the home, by way of its rooms and corridors, on three flooring — it’s fairly an effort to find all of them — however these are those that make by far the best impression due to their dimension, prime quality, and the way in which that their shut clusterings permits them to be in intimate dialog with one another.
This massive gallery is ethereal, spacious, and light-filled. It nearly bleeds into the expansive park exterior. Main off from it’s a a lot smaller one that’s dramatically completely different in environment and emotional impression. Gallery Two has no pure gentle. It shows a gaggle of 5 work, together with the final one which Howard accomplished, “Portrait of the Artist Listening to Music” (2011–16). All are individually spot-lit, leaving the remainder of the room in darkness.
The shut proximity between the work and the prints causes a giant downside for the latter. They feel and appear like lesser issues, much less charged, much less vitally alive, much less emotionally persuasive.
Howard’s work usually look very forceful, bodily. This has a lot to do with their textures, which will be tough and granular and hard-worked. Howard painted on board and, like Kossoff and Auerbach, he went again time and again to a portray — it may take years earlier than he let it go. Punishing it. Going at it. Working it over. Canvas would have given up the struggle after some time.
What’s extra, he usually let the paint spill or surge onto the frames as if, effectively, they simply couldn’t assist themselves. That they had run amuck, like unruly kids. Or they have been unstoppable, a bit like the ocean. The frames performed their half, too; they have been usually tough diamonds, purchased from some thrift store, a bit rackety or knobbly. Hire boys of frames.
Howard at all times stated, extraordinarily emphatically, that his work have been not summary. To paraphrase his phrases, they have been representations of emotional conditions. However there was a little bit of trickery at work right here, too. He usually doesn’t absolutely title individuals in his works. He doesn’t fairly need to give the sport away. When he mentions “David” in a print hanging within the Small Drawing Room upstairs, we collude in pretending to not know that it’s David Hockney.
Downstairs, amongst this intimate cluster of work, we’re within the thick of a totally declared friendship. A portray entitled “After Visiting David Hockney (second model)” (1991-92) is stuffed with probably the most extraordinary performs of power and counter-force: livid tampings and bludgeonings and end-stoppings of brushwork, with an overarching swathe of shade. It’s all a little bit of a ruse then. Pretending to be shy. However not the entire time.
These 5 work, fiercely spot-lit in opposition to a lot surrounding darkness, feel and appear like the actual factor. That is Howard in full-flight mode. So once we drift again into the light-filled first gallery, we’re confronted with works that always seem like variants on the work however lack for one thing — the unique contact. Effectively, that’s not fairly true: he did have a hand in them, however printmaking is a collaborative enterprise. They’re all so calm and so easy and so well mannered, these surfaces — all the things seems to be so tidy and so salable. Once you visited Howard’s studio throughout his lifetime, all of the work have been turned to face the wall, as in the event that they didn’t need to declare their fingers. Not so now and right here. And these frames, oh expensive, how neat and effectively mannered they give the impression of being, such well mannered vessels of containment. They’re conserving effectively away from the fury of the mark-making.
Actually, there is no textural fury of mark-making on this room, however extra a reminder of it. All that’s within the darkness of the following room, which feels ever thickening, and ever extra enclosing.
Howard Hodgkin: In a Public Backyard continues at Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery (Ealing Inexperienced, London, England) by way of March 8, 2026. The exhibition was curated by Richard Calvocoressi.
