Howard Hodgkin
(1932-2017)
Hope
Provenance
Commissioned from the artist in 1999 to celebrate the millennium by a private collector in whose possession it has remained
Exhibited
White Cube Gallery, 2000
Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2001
Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 2002 no.15
Literature
Richard Kendall, Howard Hodgkin Large Paintings 1984 -2002, 2002
Marla Price, Howard Hodgkin, The Complete Paintings, 2006, p.333, no 352
The owner of Hope commissioned Howard Hodgkin to paint the picture in 1999. It is
unusual for Hodgkin to take on such specific commissions and it took over a year to
complete and the artist considers it to be amongst his most successful compositions.
It has been exhibited at a number of important venues and was the subject of a ‘one-
picture’ exhibition at the White Cube Gallery in 2000 where it attracted much press
coverage.
Hodgkin is considered, along with Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon, one of England’s
greatest artists of the 20th Century. Like Bacon and Freud, he has an international
reputation and exhibitions of his work have been organised all over the world
in institutions that include The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and The Kimbell
Museum,Fort Worth. In the United Kingdom he has had one-man shows at the
Whitechapel Gallery, Tate Gallery,the Hayward Gallery, Dulwich Picture Gallery and
the Museum of Modern Art, Edinburgh.
