Keith Thomson

Cold Case, Original Painting

2024

HOWARD HODGKIN Blue Skies, Nothing but Blue Skies, 2002 Screenprint in Colors, Scrunched Up and Presented in a Box 5 3/25 × 6 3/10 x 2 inches Edition of 500 (unnumbered) Momart is a British company specialising in the storage, transportation, and installation of works of art. Today, the company is best known for two things: its annual artist Christmas Card, and a 2004 warehouse fire that destroyed irreplaceable art works including Tracey Emin's famous "Everyone I Have Ever Slept With. Momart's clients include the Royal Academy of Arts, Victoria & Albert Museum, National Gallery, Tate Modern, Tate Britain and Buckingham Palace. The tradition of the MOMART "Christmas card" (which would later morph into actual artist-designed work) goes back to 1984 when the first object – a festive card – was designed for the company by Bruce McLean. Since then Momart collaborated on this project with many of the top British and international artists. The complete series of Momart Christmas cards is now part of the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Tate. The present item is the vintage 2002 MOMART Christmas card, designed by Howard Hodgkin. It is a rich blue screenprint, scrunched up in a box - with the printed text MOMART CHRISTMAS CARD 2002 inside the box, the artist's name and work title, "Blue Skies, Nothing But Blue Skies" and a credit at the bottom "With thanks to Gagosian Gallery London and Peter B. Willberg." And that's the MOMART "gift". Very cool and collectible! Unnumbered, but known to have been issued in an edition of 500 About Howard Hodgkin For an artist, time can always be regained . . . because by an act of imagination you can always go back. —Howard Hodgkin One of England’s most celebrated contemporary painters, Howard Hodgkin (1932–2017) was deeply attuned to the interplay of gesture, color, and ground. His brushstrokes, set against wooden supports, often continue beyond the picture plane and onto the frame, breaking from traditional confines. Embracing time as a compositional element, his work is testament to his immersion in the intangibility of thoughts, feelings, and fleeting private moments. Hodgkin was born in London and grew up in Hammersmith Terrace. During World War II he was evacuated to Long Island, New York, for three years. In the Museum of Modern Art, New York, he saw works by School of Paris artists such as Henri Matisse, Édouard Vuillard, and Pierre Bonnard, which he could not easily have seen then in London or Paris. Back in England in 1943, Hodgkin ran away from Eton College and Bryanston School, convinced that education would impede his progress as an artist, though he encountered inspiring teachers at both schools. He then attended Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts (1949–50) and Bath Academy of Art, Corsham (1950–54). Hodgkin never belonged to a school or group. While many of his contemporaries were drawn to Pop or the School of London, he remained independent, initially marking his outsider status with a series of portraits of contemporary artists and their families. His first solo exhibition was at Arthur Tooth and Sons in London in 1962. Two years later he first visited India, following his interest in Indian miniatures, which began during his time at Eton. Collecting Indian art would remain a lifelong passion, which he initially supported by dealing in picture frames. In 1984 Hodgkin represented Britain at the Biennale di Venezia. His exhibition Forty Paintings reopened the Whitechapel Gallery, London, in 1985, and he won the Turner Prize the same year. In 1998 Hodgkin joined Gagosian, and the gallery presented his first show in the United States since his critically acclaimed 1995–96 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, which had traveled to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf; and Hayward Gallery, London. His first full retrospective opened at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, in 2006 and traveled to Tate Britain, London, and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. In the autumn of 2016 Hodgkin visited India for what was to be the last time, completing six new paintings before his return to London. These works were shown at England’s Hepworth Wakefield in 2017, in Painting India, a show that focused on the artist’s long-standing relationship with the Indian subcontinent. Starting in the 1950s, Hodgkin maintained a parallel printmaking practice, translating his visual language into works on paper. Exploring the interactions of color and space on a grander scale, he produced theatrical set designs for Ballet Rambert, the Royal Ballet, and the Mark Morris Dance Group...

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