Saturdays

The British artist Howard Hodgkin came to prominence in the late 1950s. His idiosyncratic style of painting was characterised by bold and intense colour and a vocabulary of painted gestures, made up of spots, bars and sweeps. Although working at the time of the pop art movement, he was not aligned with this group, but rather expressed personal subject matter related to his immediate social circle. He sought to record in paint his memories of meetings with friends or the atmosphere of a particular place. The paintings strive to capture the specificity of his encounters with people and places. In this painting – Saturdays – Hodgkin depicts the sitting room of his friends, the artist Peter Kinley and his wife Monika, an art dealer and curator, who lived at the time in Hammersmith, London. Although abstract at first glance, the composition describes an architectural space, with contrasting details such as bricks and wood. Like memories, his composition is made of fragments, held together by with bands of bright colour, evocative of a heightened joyful mood.

Maria Zagala, Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs