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In Touch, Checking In - Signed Print by Howard Hodgkin 1991 - MyArtBroker

In Touch, Checking In
Signed Print

Howard Hodgkin

Price data unavailable

AAGR (5 years) This estimate blends recent public auction records with our own private sale data and network demand.

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Medium: Intaglio

Edition size: 50

Year: 1991

Size: H 29cm x W 42cm

Signed: Yes

Format: Signed Print

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Track auction value trend

The value of Howard Hodgkin's In Touch, Checking In (signed) is estimated to be worth between £1,600 and £2,400. This intaglio print, created in 1991, has shown consistent value growth, with an average annual growth rate of 2%. This is a rare artwork with an auction history of three total sales since its entry to the market in April 2001. The hammer price over the past five years has ranged from £1,530 in July 2018 to £1,530 in July 2018. The edition size of this artwork is limited to 50.

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Auction Results

Auction DateAuction HouseLocation
Hammer Price
Return to Seller
Buyer Paid
November 2022Bonhams New York United States
April 2022Sworders United Kingdom
April 2019Christie's London United Kingdom
April 2001Christie's London United Kingdom

Meaning & Analysis

In Touch, Checking In, represents the third of the paintings Hodgkin realised in 1991 to visually accompany his dear friend Susan Sontag’s 1986 book, The Way We Live Now. Whilst in the first two plates the artist focused on an abstract language of colour to convey the nostalgia and astonishment that the protagonists of Sontag’s book face throughout the narration, this print uses the depiction of an old telephone as emblematic of the sudden sense of proximity and intimacy lived by the gay community in New York throughout the AIDS pandemic.

Sontag’s book narrated the story of a man who suddenly falls ill with AIDS, and followed, through many dialogues, the lives of the anonymous man’s community of friends and ex-lovers, who, although strangers, suddenly find a common ground for group bonding in the illness that their friend is living. As such, as the narration unfolds, the book follows the formation of a group identity, based on a growing concern with the meaning of life and the fear of death.

Hodgkin’s phone, as the title suggests, visually emblematises the newly created proximity found by the friends of the ill man throughout the book. Telephones allowed contact and meaningful connections to be made between what were otherwise simple acquaintances. Hodgkin’s unusual depiction, despite its simplicity, poignantly evokes a defining moment of American gay culture and identity, one marked by loss, fear and death, but also by closeness and solidarity.