Our Top 5 ABSTRACT ARTWORKS

Howard Hodgkin

Jarid's Porch, 1977

Jarid's Porch is an exceptional example of Hodgkin's profound sensitivity to the interplay of colour, gesture and ground. It belongs to the first great blossoming of the artist's printmaking practice in the 1970s, when he had begun to explore the possibilities of hand-colouring. Highly layered and technically complex, it encapsulates the tension between his desire to capture fleeting moments of emotional significance and the time-consuming process necessary to do so. In this piece the titular wraparound porch on a friend's house is expressed as a chevron of rich lemon yellow, an oasis of light in the velvety darkness of a summer's night.

Joan Miro

Céret - Hand-signed by Miro, 1977

This original lithograph is a proof made before letters were added to create a poster for an exhibition of Miró's work at the Musée d'art moderne in Céret. Only fifty signed and numbered copies (with a handful of proofs) were printed. This example originally belonged to René Le Moigne, the chromist at printing workshop Atelier Maeght until 1982.

Piet Mondrian

Place de la Concorde, 1938-43 from A Portfolio of Ten Paintings, 1967

This piece comes from the sought-after portfolio of screenprints published in 1967. Ives-Sillman, Inc was one of only a handful of publishers to produce silkscreen prints and photographs as part of their artist monographs. Over two decades from 1958 until Ives's death in 1978, Norman Ives and Sewell Sillman collaborated with some of the most important artists of their time including Josef Albers, Robert Indiana and Ellsworth Kelly.

The ten paintings reproduced in this portfolio demonstrate the very best of Mondrian's work. Published in an edition of only 150, these screenprints are a must for fans of Modernism's purest exponent. A set is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

"Place de la Concorde" was one of Mondrian's so-called 'Transatlantic paintings', one of seventeen canvases begun in Europe but reworked in New York after the artist fled the advancing Second World War. Responding to the energy of his new home, he widened some of the lines, and added in additional areas of colour, which he felt gave the painting "more boogie woogie".

Sol LeWitt

Isometric Figures 5, 2002

Sol LeWitt’s contribution to the development of conceptual art is incalculable. He stripped the process of image-making back to its barest essentials, removing all superfluous elements to achieve a balance and harmony that suggests a new kind of truth. His images are complete, self-contained worlds. In his later works he embraced the use of ever more vivid colours, bringing a sense of palpable joy to his experiments. The linocut technique used in this piece adds a particular richness to the final effect. Signed and numbered in pencil.

Agnes Martin

Untitled II from Paintings and Drawings 1974-1990, 1991

One of ten lithographs created to accompany Martin's major retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 1991.

Discussing the initial inspiration behind the grid motif, Martin recalled that "...when I first made a grid I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees and then this grid came into my mind and I thought it represented innocence, and I still do, and so I painted it and then I was satisfied. I thought, this is my vision." She also explained that “when I cover the square surfaces with rectangles it lightens the weight of the square, destroys its power.” Martin's works were the result of a painstaking process that, for her, expressed the importance of modesty and humility. Deceptively simple, they firmly eschew the burden of imagery, and are expressions of pure sensation.

While the grid is one of the most important and recognisable elements of Martin's oeuvre, she was not restrictive about the ways in which it could be deployed. As her work evolved, she incorporated the stripe as another key motif, working in dilute washes of pastel-toned acrylic paint.

Martin was also a printmaker of great significance, returning to the process throughout her life. After abandoning art in 1967, she returned to the creative arena with a series of thirty screenprints in 1973. The screenprint and lithography processes enabled her to achieve the crisp lines and sharp corners that were so important to her work, while also allowing for the extraordinary subtlety she sought in her dilute washes of colour.

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Our Top 5 ABSTRACT ARTWORKS

Here are our top 5 abstract artworks in Hidden's collection today:

Howard Hodgkin

Joan Miro

Piet Mondrian

Sol LeWitt

Agnes Martin

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