Howard Hodgkin and Martin Creed, a 50/XNUMX Exhibition to Declare Emotions

Hodgkin and Creed – Inside Out is the title of the exhibition to be held from 18 September to 17 November 2019 at the Kistefos Museum in Jevnaker in Norway.

This exhibition pairs painter Howard Hodgkin (1932-2017) with conceptual artist Martin Creed. It celebrates their belief that art offers a framework through which we can express and come to terms with our complex emotional lives.

Hodgkin famously described his boldly colored and abstract paintings as representative images of emotional situations. He stated that the only way an artist could communicate with the world was on a feeling level. Throughout his career, he has perfected a unique visual vocabulary that has given convincing form to an otherwise impalpable emotional experience. Using very different media, ranging from cacti to iron beams, Creed's minimal conceptual works bring structure to what he calls the "soup" of emotion. Hodgkin admired Creed's direct and humorous approach to the same raw material while recognizing his own techniques in it, including terse and repetitive visual languages, an interest in performance, and a commitment to a non-autographic kind of subjectivity.

The pairing of these artists offers a refreshing insight into their work: the first exhibition conceived since his death, Inside Out takes us beyond a lyrical reading of Hodgkin's work and allows us to reconsider it in the context of contemporary art practice. At the same time, she approaches the minimalist work of Creed through the expressionism of Hodgkin, extracting its essential emotional element, which is often overlooked.

In 2016 the artists showed their mutual admiration when Hodgkin invited Creed to present him with the first Swarowski Whitechapel Art Icon award. Creed performed the song "Feeling Blue" in honor of him. The exhibition is curated by Guy Robertson and produced by Kistefos in collaboration with The Estate of Howard Hodgkin and Martin Creed. It brings together important works from public and private collections, including the Christen Sveaas Art Collection.

Born in Yorkshire and raised in Glasgow, Martin Creed he rose to fame in 2001 when he won the Turner Award with "Job 227: The Lights Go On and Off." This controversial work involved the intermittent switching on and off of a light in an empty gallery, and is typical of the playful and understated nature of Creed's oeuvre. His practice has been described as “a series of mindfulness exercises,” using common materials and minimal intervention to draw things to our attention that we might otherwise overlook. Using different materials such as paper, music, air, light and text, experience is often the key to understanding the work of Creed. He states that his art is “50% what I do and 50% what others make of it”.

Martin Creed was born in Wakefield in 1968 and grew up in Glasgow. He currently lives and works in London and Alicudi, Italy. In 2001 Creed was the winner of the Turner Award. His practice emerges from an ongoing series of investigations into mundane phenomena. Creed's works are identified primarily by numbers, so each piece is added to its catalog system with the same status, regardless of its size or what it's made of. His subtle interventions often reintroduce us to everyday elements. Creed's choice and use of materials – simple sheets of A4 paper, blu-tak, masking tape, party balloons, simple or “uncritical” language such as text or song lyrics – is a thoughtful celebration of the ordinary, a targeted reading of the ambiguity of everyday "things".

Howard Hodgkin (1932–2017) was deeply attuned to the interplay of gesture, color and terrain. His brushstrokes, resting on wooden supports, often continue beyond the picture plane and onto the frame, breaking away from traditional boundaries. Embracing time as a compositional element, his work bears witness to his immersion in the intangibility of thoughts, feelings and fleeting private moments.