oil on canvas

Artwork date: 1997/8
Signature details: each panel signed, dated, inscribed with the title and order of display on the reverse inscribed ‘Just as “Mr. W.H.” was the “onlie begetter” of Shakespeare’s sonnets, so Mr Kendall Geer is the “onlie begetter” of This triptych. He declares in public “Hodgins will never no a painting as big as “The Triple Gates of Hell at the Joubert Park Gallery”. He challenges. I accept. This is the result. With affection for K.G., Robert Hodgins, May 98.’ [sic] on a label on the reverse
Literature: Atkinson, B., Becker, R., Powell, I., Geers, K. and Godby, M. (eds.). (2002). Robert Hodgins. Cape Town: Tafelberg Publishers, colour illustration on p.66.

(1)

198 x 444 cm

ABOUT THE ARTWORK:

Robert Hodgins’ Night of the Awards was the title work of the artist’s fifth exhibition at the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, in 1998. He was already the firm favourite of the Gallery’s owner, Linda Givon, who was soon to call him South Africa’s “King of the Canvas” and, tellingly for the subject of this work, her “Superstar Matinee Idol”. Buoyed by his success, Hodgins became increasingly ambitious in his work.

Responding to a challenge by his friend Kendell Geers, as the inscription on the back records, Night of the Awards, at almost four and a half metres across, is probably the biggest painting he ever made – suitable, one might think, for the boardrooms whose suited and cigar-smoking denizens he so liked to pillory. Moreover, his new confidence encouraged extraordinary audacity in the rendering of the principles of figurative art – form, space, narrative, character, and expression. At the same time, however, Hodgins always expressed surprise at his success and doubted that he actually ‘belonged’.These contradictions are apparent in Night of the Awards and several other works of this time. The subject seems to be drawn from some awards ceremony, probably one witnessed on television.

On a loosely-defined stage-like space, three figures are presented to the audience/spectator, with the one on the right apparently speaking and the other two listening self-consciously to his address. These three figures constitute a tour de force of painting. On one level, the theatrical rhetoric of the occasion is fully realised in their forms; but, on another, the artist effectively challenges every aspect of their physical presence: contours, planes, scale and spatial position shift; the figures – and, for the central image, the face – seem to multiply and move through space like some condensed Muybridge photogravure; and uncertainty – physical and existential - unsettles the image.

Night of the Awards is a spectacular disquisition on the nature of success, celebrity and fame – for Hodgins himself, and for his audience, the viewer.

Michael Godby