1932 London – 2017 London

Sir Gordon Howard Eliot Hodgkin was a British painter and printmaker, one of the last great artists who can be counted among the British abstraction of the 20^th century, which also includes Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson.

His contemporaries and friends also included British pop artists: Patrick Caulfield, David Hockney, Peter Blake and others.

Hodgkin’s paintings form an exciting interface between pure arrangement of colour and texture and subtly evocative figuration. His work is regarded as semi-abstract, because despite the abstraction they still maintain a reference to the subject. A special feature of his work is the frames which are included in the composition.

In 1984 he represented England at the Venice Biennale and in 1985 he was awarded the Turner Prize. In 1995 he was a received a full retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He was awarded the Shakespeare Prize in 1997 and received an honorary doctorate from Oxford University in 2000.