Girl At Night

Girl At Night is one of Hodgkin’s earliest attempts at printmaking. The artist created it in the second half of the 1960s when he was still teaching at Bath Academy of Art – the atheneum where he himself had studied just up until a few years before. The print is rather atypical of Hodgkin’s practice, both in subject matter and style, and offers a glimpse into the stylistic developments of what would become one of the greatest British artists of all times.

Girl At Night does not develop in full the abstract language that will become typical of Hodgkin’s later works, where colours explode on the paper surface through visible dynamic and energetic brushstrokes, the patches of colour of the print are here contained by clearly defined shapes that create a quasi-representational figure. The amorphous human figure in the foreground of the print is captured in a fluid movement, and any physiological feature is erased. While known to often depict palm trees, Hodgkin rarely represented other clearly identifiable subjects, making this print, and its sister Girl On A Sofa, a rare find in Hodgkin’s oeuvre. Comparingly, this print has the charm of simplicity, its formal composition almost gesturing to the Cubist vocabulary of Pablo Picasso.