Howard Hodgkin was a British artist who was born, lived and worked in London, United Kingdom nearly all of his life. Hodgkin never belonged to a specific movement or group of artists but is one of England’s most celebrated contemporary painters. Both his paintings and parallel printmaking practice exhibit a mastery of gesture, composition, ground and color—frequently breaking past the confines of the canvas and dynamically expanding onto the picture frame.
Hodgkin grew up in Hammersmith Terrace, United Kingdom. During World War II however, Hodgkin was evacuated to Long Island, New York, where he began to familiarize himself with the work of artists from the School of Paris such as Henri Matisse at the Museum of Modern Art. After his return to England, Hodgkin briefly attended the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts and then the Bath Academy of Art. Hodgkin’s first solo show was at Arthur Tooth and Sons in London in 1962. After a couple of decades of a successful career, Hodgkin then represented Britain at the Biennale Arte di Venezia in 1984. He won the Turner Prize the next year in 1985. Hodgkin’s first solo show in the United States was in 1998 at Gagosian Gallery, after a successful exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, from 1995 to 1996. His first retrospective opened in 2006 at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin.
Hodgkin has been exhibited extensively both nationally internationally, and his work is held in the collections of several prominent institutions including the British Museum, London; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Tate Gallery, London.