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The Hospital Room Was Choked With Flowers - Signed Print by Howard Hodgkin 1991 - MyArtBroker

The Hospital Room Was Choked With Flowers
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 64cm

Signed: Yes

Format: Signed Print

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The value of Howard Hodgkin's The Hospital Room Was Choked With Flowers (signed) is estimated to be worth between £550 to £800. This intaglio print, created in 1991, has an auction history of five sales since its initial sale on 13th January 2010. 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
April 2019Christie's London United Kingdom
November 2018Swann Galleries United States
May 2017Swann Galleries United States
October 2015Bonhams Knightsbridge United Kingdom
January 2010Christie's New York United States

Meaning & Analysis

The Hospital Room Was Chocked with Flowers constitutes the fourth plate that Hodgkin realised following the publication of his dear friend Susan Sontag’s seminal book, The Way We Live Now. Sontag’s book was written as a personal response by the writer to the AIDS pandemic and the way its dissemination had tainted the lives of the gay community with anxiety and fear. The main character of the book is an anonymous man who suddenly falls ill with AIDS. As he lays in his hospital room, each day closer to death, the man is surrounded by his close effects, as well as by ex-lovers and acquaintances who grow increasingly close to him.


Hodgkin’s plates accompany the narration. Following his In Touch, Checking In, which is surprisingly representational, Hodgkin returned through this print to a more abstract and evocative language of colours and forms. While the red dots punctuating the image are clear allusions to the flowers the man receives following his hospitalisation, the overlay of greens, blacks and oranges confuses the representation and invokes the sense of suffocation felt by the man so clearly described by Sontag in the book. As much as in Sontag’s book as in Hodgkin’s visual vocabulary, flowers become emblems not only of affection and solidarity but also, as perceived by the dying man, of loss and irrevocable disease.

  • British artist Howard Hodgkin was a luminary of abstraction. Representing Britain at the 1984 Venice Biennale, winning the Turner Prize in 1985, and knighted in 1992, Hodgkin established a legacy by pushing the boundaries of convention. Indian culture and painting heavily influenced the artist's work, infiltrating it most obviously in his bold colour choices. Evoking the bliss of exotic travels and past memories, Hodgkin's abstract representations provide an intimate insight into his world. The vibrancy of his palette and expression of the brushstrokes distinguished the artist from his contemporaries, seeing him gain international recognition.