Small Indian Sky

Born in London, Howard Hodgkin had an enduring relationship with India, having visited for the first time in 1964. The country has been the subject of numerous of his paintings and prints created from memory that encapsulate his sensory impressions. The titles of these works allude to encounters he had in India, including meetings with friends, visits to specific sites, direct experiences of the seasons, and travels through its vast and varied geography. While his earliest works that reference India, from the mid-1960s, jostle between figuration and abstraction, those from the 1980s and ‘90s are less representational. Small Indian Sky hails from this latter group of paintings and shares their dense layering of paint from which the image is revealed. In these works, Hodgkin started to use Liquin, an alkyd-based medium that is quick drying, facilitating the application of multiple layers of paint. In Small Indian Sky, the gray-green brushstroke in the foreground disrupts the burning red-orange background. The viewer is drawn into the small work by this confident gestural mark making, and then left to decipher the meaning for themselves.