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Medium: Lithograph
Edition size: 75
Year: 1966
Size: H 50cm x W 65cm
Signed: Yes
Format: Signed Print
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Auction Date | Auction House | Location | Hammer Price | Return to Seller | Buyer Paid |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
September 2021 | Christie's London | United Kingdom | |||
September 2019 | Christie's London | United Kingdom | |||
April 2019 | Rosebery's Fine Art Auctioneers | United Kingdom | |||
March 2019 | Sotheby's Online | United Kingdom | |||
October 2017 | Uppsala Auktionskammare | Sweden | |||
December 2011 | Christie's London | United Kingdom | |||
January 2008 | Lyon & Turnbull Edinburgh | United Kingdom |
This signed lithograph from 1966 is a rare, limited edition of 75 from Howard Hodgkin’s 5 Rooms series. The horizontal print presents to the viewer a quasi-abstract and highly stylised representation of a human figure, a girl – as the title indicates – painted in white and orange tones on a black background.
Girl At Night is one of Hodgkin’s earliest attempts at printmaking. The artist created it in the second half of the 1960s when he was still teaching at Bath Academy of Art – the atheneum where he himself had studied just up until a few years before. The print is rather atypical of Hodgkin’s practice, both in subject matter and style, and offers a glimpse into the stylistic developments of what would become one of the greatest British artists of all times.
Girl At Night does not develop in full the abstract language that will become typical of Hodgkin’s later works, where colours explode on the paper surface through visible dynamic and energetic brushstrokes, the patches of colour of the print are here contained by clearly defined shapes that create a quasi-representational figure. The amorphous human figure in the foreground of the print is captured in a fluid movement, and any physiological feature is erased. While known to often depict palm trees, Hodgkin rarely represented other clearly identifiable subjects, making this print, and its sister Girl On A Sofa, a rare find in Hodgkin’s oeuvre. Comparingly, this print has the charm of simplicity, its formal composition almost gesturing to the Cubist vocabulary of Pablo Picasso.
British artist Howard Hodgkin was a luminary of abstraction. Representing Britain at the 1984 Venice Biennale, winning the Turner Prize in 1985, and knighted in 1992, Hodgkin established a legacy by pushing the boundaries of convention. Indian culture and painting heavily influenced the artist's work, infiltrating it most obviously in his bold colour choices. Evoking the bliss of exotic travels and past memories, Hodgkin's abstract representations provide an intimate insight into his world. The vibrancy of his palette and expression of the brushstrokes distinguished the artist from his contemporaries, seeing him gain international recognition.