Howard Hodgkin
b. 1932, United Kingdom
d. 2017
English painter, 1932-2017
Howard Hodgkin has long been celebrated as one of the foremost British contemporary painters. Characterised by his distinctively gestural application of paint and sensitivity to colour, he was educated at Camberwell School of Art between 1949 and 1950 and Bath Academy of Art between 1950 - 54, and went on to have his first solo show in 1962 at Arthur Tooth and Sons in London. In 1985 Hodgkin was awarded the Turner Prize, the year after representing Britain at the Venice Biennale with his exhibition Forty Paintings, which later opened at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. By 1995 his work was exhibited in America at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas. His first full retrospective was in 2006 at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, which then traveled to Tate Britain, London, and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid. In 1992 Hodgkin was awarded a Knighthood and in 2003 was made Companion of Honour. Almost a decade later, he was the first artist to be awarded the Swarovski Whitechapel Icon Award. He lived and worked in London until his death in 2017.