On loan to The Met The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
In Mirza’s Room
Howard Hodgkin British
Not on view
The title of this large-scale painting by Hodgkin, an essay in color and light, alludes to a shared moment and place: the sitting room of a friend's apartment in St. John’s Wood, London. The artist employed his favorite pictorial device—a contained space, typically a room—which is defined here by the four bold sweeps of yellow. This sense of interiority reflects Hodgkin’s use of visual tools as “containers of memory and experience,” a concept reinforced by the incorporation of the painted frame into the body of the composition. In this inner world, mood prevails over image, a quality Hodgkin’s works share with traditional Indian painting.