Frances Hodgkins: European Journeys exhibition at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, marks the 150th anniversary of the artist’s birth.
Frances Hodgkins: European Journeys is the culmination of a signi cant international project to bring together artworks from New Zealand and around the globe to explore the artist’s place in 20th-century art.
The exhibition traces Frances Hodgkins’ creative and peripatetic life through France, Morocco and Spain to her nal days in England, examining the in uence of location on her development as a modernist painter and the notion of travel and journeying as a source of artistic inspiration.
It includes more than 150 artworks produced between 1901 and 1946: from early watercolour travel sketches of the French Riviera, Morocco and Venice, through to her rst contact with modernism in Paris, and oil paintings from her later life in Britain.
Exhibition curator and Auckland Art Gallery Senior Curator, International Art, Mary Kisler says the exhibition is the result of almost a decade-long research project that saw her retracing Hodgkins’ extensive journeys throughout Europe.
“Apart from the periods of the two World Wars, Hodgkins moved on average six times a year, travelling from place to place in search of inspiration for her work. She tended to move to locations nearer the Mediterranean where she found stimulus from artists’ communities, including Martigues, St Tropez, Cassis, Ibiza and the Costa Brava,” says Kisler.
Frances Hodgkins: Euroepan Journeys, Auckland Art Gallery until 1 September 2019.
