Howard Hodgkin

A new series of four prints entitled Venetian Views will be unveiled at the Alan Cristea Gallery, London, before being exhibited extensively in commercial art galleries around the world.

Hodgkin's original intention was to produce a number of small illustrations for Thomas Mann's novel Death In Venice. When this fell through, the project metamorphosed into more grandiose form; four very large prints were created which evoke the mood of different times of day in Venice through vivid, transparent colour, texture and relief. All the images were printed from the same five copper plates, yet the different quantities of hand colouring and the variations in technique gives each its own distinct identity.

The Venetian Views are images of great sophistication and complexity, defined by an extraordinary fusion of printing and painting. As a quartet, they encompass the artist's vision of Venice as a place of transience and beauty. The exhibition will consist only of these four magnificent images of which the Alan Cristea Gallery is the sole and exclusive publisher.

This exhibition coincides with a retrospective of Howard Hodgkin's paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.