Howard Hodgkin: Absent Friends

Fabulous colourful exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery of abstract portraits by Howard Hodgkin.

As my readers may know normally I dislike abstract portraits and have a bit of a rant about them but I loved these! The exhibition was really enhanced by the great commentaries which really helped you to understand what you were looking at and after a while I felt confident enough to study the pictures and analyse them before reading the notes and I found I could work out what he setting, number of people and emotion of the work was.

I got a lovely sense of friendship from the show with a number of the sitters appearing more than once and a real feeling of the presence of the person rather than the image of them. It was also good an explaining the development of his work and how it became more and more abstract as he developed his ideas.

I loved the way he made the frame part of the picture with the picture escaping across, at times, quite ornate frames. My favourite picture was “In Bed in Venice” which conveyed the idea of being in an old building looking out at the light of the Grand Canal as well as comfort and passion of waking up in such a lovely place.

Closes on 18 June 2017

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