This exhibition smells. Trust me. Step inside the Gagosian’s cool, airy space. Now, draw a deep breath. There, almost imperceptibly, you get a distinct whiff of... wood.
Hodgkin, considered one of Britain’s most important artists when he died in 2017, abandoned painting on canvas way back in 1972, switching instead to wooden panels, some of them with slightly raised ‘frames’ around the edges.
Presented here are Hodgkin’s last works, including six he painted in India just before his death. The gallery is showing 32 paintings, nearly all small-sized. And it’s not just the faint, earthy perfume that gives his output a slightly rugged quality.
Hodgkin’s artworks are masculine things. The fat brush strokes are decisive, almost brutally applied, at times seeming like the great-great-great grandsons of the ones used by Turner in his darkest scenes of shipwrecks and storms. And the colours are bold and fully saturated – quite similar to the glorious Technicolor palette favoured by David Hockney.
Seeing them up close allows you to appreciate the thickness of the paint, and the way it still almost looks wet. You can also see how, at times, it swirls and clots together as the colours mix.
There are a few treats here: the moody ‘From Memory’, a crow-like splodge of coal-toned bleakness, and ‘Darkness at Noon’ where dusky rose and claret coagulate together. But on the whole this is an exhibition that will please existing Hodgkin fans, rather than create new ones. It’s just a shame we can’t publish scratch and sniff reviews.