Robert HODGINS (1920 – 2010)

BIOGRAPHY

Robert Hodgins was born in Dulwich, London, England. In 1938, he immigrated to South Africa, where he joined the Union Defence Force, under whom he served during World War Two.

After being discharged at the end of the war, Hodgins attended Goldsmith’s College of Art, University of London (1950 – 53), where he initially studied education, but ultimately graduated with a National Diploma in Design.

In 1954, he returned to South Africa where taught painting and drawing at the School of Art, Pretoria Technical College (1954 – 1962).

From 1962 to 1966, he worked as a journalist, art critic and then Assistant Editor of Newscheck magazine.

From 1966 to 1983, he taught at the Fine Art Department of the University of the Witwatersrand as a senior lecturer. Throughout these years, Hodgins played a significant role as a mentor to many students who are now recognised as some of South Africa’s best-known artists including Jane Alexander and Deborah Bell.
Although Hodgins had been painting and exhibiting since the early 1950s, it wasn’t until the 1980s, when he was in his sixties, that he received recognition for his own art. He began painting full time in 1983. A firm critic of the apartheid regime, he earned a reputation for his satirical social commentary and use of painting as a site for the mockery of self-important figures. Malevolent male characters in pinstriped suits loom large in his paintings. Although the human form is the subject matter of many of his paintings, colour, space and placing play a very important role in his works. Hodgins was centrally concerned with the formal elements of colour, form and composition, taking inspiration from the Colour Field painters, such as Mark Rothko.

Hodgins exhibited extensively in South Africa, London, France, the United States and Netherlands for over six decades.

In 2013, the Goodman Gallery hosted Looking Back, a retrospective exhibition of the Hodgins’s work in a variety of media. That same year, the Wits Art Museum (WAM) exhibited A Lasting Impression: The Robert Hodgins Print Archive, showing almost 200 print works from the artist’s personal collection, which he had donated to the museum. The exhibition was accompanied by a publication of the same name.

SOURCES
‘Robert Hodgins,’ Aspire, https://www.aspireart.net/artist/robert-hodgins/?ar=1748.
‘Robert Hodgins,’ The Viewing Room, https://theviewingroom.co.za/artists/robert-hodgins.