Bedroom

Bedroom, together with Girl On A Sofa, Girl At Night, Interior With Figure and Indian Room, represents one of Hodgkin’s earliest attempts at printmaking, and, with its unique features, is one of the rarest prints in his production. The scene is abstract and representational details are scarce, in true Hodgkin style, but the title situates the image within the interior space of a bedroom, an interesting and surprising departure from Hodgkin’s habit of portraying landscapes or window views.

To further differentiate it from the artist’s later works, Bedroom is also starkly bare and simple compared to Hodgkin’s highly rich explosions of colour, where the painterly brushstrokes often protrude outside of the paper and onto the frame. Instead, in this work, Hodgkin decided to focus the viewer’s attention on the centre of the print, where a clear-cut turquoise geometrical shape, delineated by a thick black outline, interacts with a less-defined orange shape.