“Print and Painting Exhibition”, a month-long solo art show by British artist Howard Hodgkin, is going on at the Bengal Art Lounge in Gulshan. The exhibition is open to all and will continue till May 3 from 12pm to 8pm.
The exhibition is a joint venture by Bengal Art Lounge and British Council Bangladesh and is the first exhibition of Hodgkin’s work in the country. A total of 12 artworks are on display at the show.
Hodgkin has described his subjects as simple and straightforward. His works depict some ordinary moments with the exclusivity of his aesthetic compositions. In each painting, Hodgkin's subject is a presence that is sensed rather than apprehended. The artworks, inspired by everyday memories, places, and encounters, are named such as “Still life in a restaurant,” “Still life,” and “A storm.”
Howard Hodgkin, by his own definition, paints representational pictures of emotional situations. With events and emotions recalled and represented as spatial and formal experiments, it is a language of layering and of vivid accumulation well served by the painterly print. Despite their apparent spontaneity and usually small scale, many of Hodgkin's paintings took years to complete, with the artist returning to a work after a wait and then changing it or adding to it.
He often paints over the frames of his pictures, emphasizing the idea of the painting as an object. Rather than painting on canvas, he experimented on wooden items such as bread-board or the top of old tables as the surfaces of his paintings. A number of his works are surrounded by rectangles of simple colour than the conventional style of being enclosed in a frame.
Disaster Management and Relief Minister Abul Hassan Mahmood Ali inaugurated the exhibition on April 19 as chief guest. The inaugural program was also attended by Robin Davies, partnerships and program’s director of the British Council; Luva Nahid Chowdhury, director general of Bengal Foundation; and Nawshin Khair, director of Bengal Art Lounge.
