.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Painted in 2001, Realism is an intimate abstract painting by British artist and Turner prize winner, Howard Hodgkin. With thick, freely applied brushstrokes, Hodgkin presents a vivid palette of persimmon orange, vermillion red and a luxurious teal. In this painting, Hodgkin overtly emphasises the picture plane through his signature wood construction. Appearing almost sculptural, Hodgkin's gestures cover each smooth stretch and groove of the wood, creating illusionistic depth in the picture plane. Exhibited in 2002 at The Galleries Show at the Royal Academy in London, Realism is a masterful exemplar of Hodgkin's unique and expressive style.
In Realism, we see the championing of a naturalistic, ephemeral vision of reality in painting, a tribute to the sketchy and evanescent brushstrokes of Degas and Manet. The dominant red brushstroke, though it fills most of the picture plane, it remains soft and fluid, highlighting the flatness of the surface of the wood. This is of utmost important to Hodgkin, as he once revealed: '[When I'm working] I'm thinking about making illusionistic spaces... I know that for me nothing in painting matters more than that an artist should be able to create an illusion of depth without disturbing the flatness of the picture surface' (H. Hodgkin, interview with David Sylvester, Howard Hodgkin: Forty Paintings 1973-84, exh. cat., Whitechapel Art Gallery, London 1984, p. 101).
The sublimity of an unfinished, or seemingly unfinished painting is reflected in the immediate and highly emotive qualities of Realism. Hodgkin's conception of 'realism' is predicated on the sketchy and fleeting impressions of everyday life, reminiscent in some ways of the Impressionists. When asked his opinion on the completeness of Hélène Rouart in her Father's Study by Edgar Degas from 1886, Hodgkin professed: 'I think the whole picture is deliberately made to look like an unfinished painting. There are those curious red and blue pastel linesthey lighten the atmosphere, they lighten the surface... To me, that picture has the most extraordinary sense of reality about it because of the fact that what you see has not been finally made into the sort of tight image of realism... but has the kind of glancing, slightly dematerialised quality that one does actually see in reality' (Ibid, p.97). For Hodgkin, realism, the ability to depict reality, is not based on the how accurate, how exact the mimesis is in representation; he is more concerned with the way one sees, experiences, in real life and how this translates onto the picture plane.
In Realism, we see the championing of a naturalistic, ephemeral vision of reality in painting, a tribute to the sketchy and evanescent brushstrokes of Degas and Manet. The dominant red brushstroke, though it fills most of the picture plane, it remains soft and fluid, highlighting the flatness of the surface of the wood. This is of utmost important to Hodgkin, as he once revealed: '[When I'm working] I'm thinking about making illusionistic spaces... I know that for me nothing in painting matters more than that an artist should be able to create an illusion of depth without disturbing the flatness of the picture surface' (H. Hodgkin, interview with David Sylvester, Howard Hodgkin: Forty Paintings 1973-84, exh. cat., Whitechapel Art Gallery, London 1984, p. 101).
The sublimity of an unfinished, or seemingly unfinished painting is reflected in the immediate and highly emotive qualities of Realism. Hodgkin's conception of 'realism' is predicated on the sketchy and fleeting impressions of everyday life, reminiscent in some ways of the Impressionists. When asked his opinion on the completeness of Hélène Rouart in her Father's Study by Edgar Degas from 1886, Hodgkin professed: 'I think the whole picture is deliberately made to look like an unfinished painting. There are those curious red and blue pastel linesthey lighten the atmosphere, they lighten the surface... To me, that picture has the most extraordinary sense of reality about it because of the fact that what you see has not been finally made into the sort of tight image of realism... but has the kind of glancing, slightly dematerialised quality that one does actually see in reality' (Ibid, p.97). For Hodgkin, realism, the ability to depict reality, is not based on the how accurate, how exact the mimesis is in representation; he is more concerned with the way one sees, experiences, in real life and how this translates onto the picture plane.