Robert Hodgins
“A self-proclaimed “optimistic old sod”, Robert Hodgins once described painting to be a “a bit like surfing” in that a good deal of time is spent bobbing about, waiting for the right wave to come along…Another Hodgins maxim is that “subject matter is not content”. Art is an “auto-intoxication that allows one to live through marriages, divorces, deaths and unhappy love affairs, and come up smiling all the time”. Brenda Atkinson has noted Hodgins’ distinctive “British post-war vision”. His familiar icons of malevolent businessmen in pinstriped suits, prison cells, historical references and political tyrants still reappear, both tempered and aggravated by his mastery of colour and texture which sensitively negotiate the terrain between seriousness and sombreness.”
Kathryn Smith, 2000.
Robert Hodgins (1920 - 2010) was born in Dulwich, London, and immigrated to South Africa in 1938. In 1944 he returned to England, and studied art and education at Goldsmiths College at the University of London, where he received an arts and crafts certificate in 1951 and a National Diploma of Design in painting in 1953. He returned to South Africa, where he taught at the Pretoria Technical College School of Art from 1954. From 1962 he was a journalist and critic for Newscheck magazine. He lectured in painting at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, from 1966 to 1983.
In 1983, he retired to paint full-time. His work has been included in many solo and group exhibitions in South Africa and abroad and can be seen in many galleries, corporate and public collections, including Anglo American, the Johannesburg Art Gallery, the Sandton Art Gallery, the Pretoria Art Museum, the South African National Gallery in Cape Town, University of South Africa (UNISA), the University of the Witwatersrand Art Galleries, and the William Humphries Art Gallery in Kimberley.
