“It was in 2019, the year which marked the 150th celebration of Hodgkins’ birth, that I walked into Tate Britain while visiting London on business. There, hanging on the feature wall of this enduring institution was Frances Hodgkins’ oil Wings Over Water, c.1932, which every visitor to the museum passed upon entering.”
— John Gow, 2025
Frances Hodgkins is one of New Zealand’s defining figures of early modernism. A fiercely independent woman living at the turn of the 20th century, she dedicated her life to art—travelling frequently around Europe, looking at the world around her for inspiration. She developed an excellent reputation in the United Kingdom, France, Australia, and New Zealand, particularly for her skill with watercolour and gouache. While influential during her lifetime, Hodgkins’ stature has continued to grow since her death in 1947.
Hodgkins’ lifelong determination to make art, to continue challenging the conventions of her perceived style, drove her to embed herself in the very heart of the art world in the UK and gain the respect of her peers and art critics alike. Always struggling for money, she relied heavily on her family, and in particular, on her friends and patrons in the UK. They saw her rare talent and backed her drive to make new and challenging works. Just as her audience would come to terms with one body of work Hodgkins would push through a barrier and leap into a new, more challenging style. She was never complacent and was always excited about the next work she was going to create. Creating Space brings together a collection of works in graphite, watercolour, gouache and oil. Travel with Hodgkins from Dordrecht to Dorset, over forty years of her practice, and see her continually striving towards a new visual language.
