Dimensions: support: 1091 x 1395 mm
Copyright: © Howard Hodgkin | CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED, Photo: Tate
Editor: This is Howard Hodgkin's painting, R.B.K., housed here at the Tate. The composition is so vibrant, but the stripes almost feel like they're censoring what's underneath. What’s your take on this piece? Curator: Hodgkin’s work, particularly R.B.K., speaks to a post-colonial dialogue, doesn’t it? The vibrant colours and gestural abstraction hint at the sensuality of lived experience, but the overlaid stripes introduce a critical lens, a kind of obscuring that evokes the layered complexities of memory and representation. Editor: Obscuring? Curator: Yes, in what ways could these stripes symbolize imposed structures—social, political, or even historical narratives—that filter our access to, and understanding of, direct experience? Editor: That's a really interesting perspective; I hadn't considered it that way. Curator: Exactly, it’s in these tensions that the painting truly comes alive!
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In this painting, eight green diagonal stripes partly obscure a view through a rectangular window into a room. In this space, a seated figure appears to be looking at another rectangle. This could be a window or maybe a painting. The figure is Hodgkin’s friend, the painter RB Kitaj. Many of Hodgkin’s portraits from this time show his subjects in unknown places, painted with colourful abstract shapes that makes them difficult to identify. He painted on wood to give his artworks more of the quality of solid objects. Gallery label, January 2020
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