Flowering Palm
Flowering Palm
Signed Print
Howard Hodgkin
POA
This estimate blends recent public auction records with our own private sale data and network demand.
Etching, 1990
Signed Print Edition of 55
H 149cm x W 121cm
Critical Review
This signed etching from 1990 is a rare, limited edition of 55 from Howard Hodgkin’s Palms series. The vertical print presents to the viewer a colourful representation of a blooming palm tree, painted in a bright, almost neon green, against a yellow background.
Flowering Palm is perhaps one of the most representational and clearly decipherable of Hodgkin’s Palm series, in a clear departure from the abstract and dynamic language of his Black and Night Palms. Here again, Hodgkin returns to the motif of the palm, an image the artist was dearly attached to. Palms attracted Hodgkin for varying reasons, which the artist recounted in many interviews throughout his life. Chief among them, was that palms reminded Hodgkin of his exotic trips to India and Morocco, which he tried to visually evoke and reminisce in many of his paintings. Additionally, painting palms lent itself perfectly well to the brash painting technique that Hodgkin clearly loved: for the artist, painting entailed gestural freedom and expressiveness. The undulated motif of the palm leaf was well suited to Hodgkin’s preferences and encouraged the artist to reiterate the motif over and over.
