3:09pm Wednesday 21st July 2010
By Theresa Thompson
Make no bones about it, this is the show to go to this summer in Oxford. Modern Art Oxford exhibits 25 paintings by Sir Howard Hodgkin, all from the last decade, some never before seen by the public.
It is 30 years since Hodgkin last showed at Oxford. Then it was 45 paintings from 1949-1975. Now it’s 25 of his most recent paintings, and it shows Hodgkin — born 1932, said by many to be Britain's greatest painter — still using abstraction as a means of expressing experience, with some stylistic changes, but as relevant, exciting and radical as ever.
His works have always had immense visual power and emotional charge. This doesn’t change. But many here demonstrate a newer Hodgkin, more direct perhaps, certainly in execution — less the multiple layers worked over many years until finished, until “the subject comes back” as he says. They are freer, by and large, more economical, but just as dramatic.
The exhibition starts in MAO’s redesigned Foyer Gallery — the Pembroke Street entrance is now reinstated as a gallery, while a second entrance off St Ebbes enters via a new café — with six smallish works from 2001-2003.
Some familiar territory: the bare wood of the boards left to feature in its own right, as in Mud and Dirty Weather. Also, The Deep (After Ryder), a painting with jewel-like intensity that pays homage to an admired American artist; as does After Ellsworth Kelly, three bold strokes slicing down the reverse of a bread board.
They catch you out, these paintings. Even if you think you know what to expect from Howard Hodgkin’s work, they still surprise.
Upstairs, four of his largest ever works — a series of a sort, though each stands alone — have titles plundering childhood memories of a song of the American West. These fabulous works diminish in complexity, from the first, Home, Home on the Range, a glorious evocation of warmth and domesticity, through to And the Skies Are Not Cloudy All Day, where green dashed marks float as though in the wind over the surface.
Up here too is Damp Autumn. Virtually monochrome, quite unlike his others, I found it magnetic and enveloping. Earth brown brush marks and dappled depths drew me into what one moment was a murky wood, all tangled branches, unsettling shadows, and the next its edge with fields beyond. I could almost smell the damp.
Finally, Leaf (2007-2009), the smallest work (pictured), a single swirl of an olive green brushstroke, spilling the tiniest bit on to the old wood frame, is elegant and eloquent.
On until September 5, the show is varied and a delight. The catalogue is as well — and selling like hotcakes, I’m told.
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