LONDON.- The National Portrait Gallery is staging the first exhibition devoted to the portraits of the British painter Howard Hodgkin. The exhibition includes unseen and new works.

Howard Hodgkin: Absent Friends is the first exhibition to focus on Hodgkin's portraits. This important aspect of Hodgkin's work has been largely overlooked because his work appears abstract. However, the exhibition shows the breadth and nature of Hodgkin's long-standing engagement with portraiture. With over 55 works from collections around the world and dating from 1949 to the present, the exhibition shows the development of Hodgkin's portraits, exploring his important contribution to our understanding of what constitutes a portrait and examining key themes within the artist's work: colour, memory, emotion, process and imagination.

Hodgkin's art can be seen as providing memorials for people, many of whom are friends, whose absence is countered by the corresponding physical presence of particular paintings. Descriptive elements visible in his earlier portraits from the 1950s are subsumed within paintings that have, over the course of more than fifty years, become more psychologically charged and apparently abstract, but no less connected with evoking specific individuals in particular situations. 'I am a representational painter, but not a painter of appearances', says Hodgkin, 'I paint representational pictures of emotional situations.'

Featuring key works from a range of international public and private collections, Howard Hodgkin: Absent Friends traces the evolution of the artist's visual language and his engagement with a range of friends and others within the artist's circle. Peter Blake, Stephen Buckley, Patrick Caulfield, David Hockney, Philip King, R.B.Kitaj and Richard Smith are among the many leading artists portrayed.

Internationally recognised as one of Britain's leading artists Hodgkin was awarded the Turner Prize in 1985, a year after representing Great Britain at the Venice Biennale and solo exhibitions of his work have been held in Europe and the USA - including major retrospectives at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and Tate Britain, London.Dr Nicholas Cullinan, Director, National Portrait Gallery, London, says: 'Our two spring exhibitions bring together a groundbreaking survey of the abstract portraits of Howard Hodgkin, one of Britain's greatest living painters, together with an inspired exhibition pairing the works of Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun - two pioneering artists who, although separated by several decades, address similarly compelling themes of gender, identity, masquerade, performance and self-portraiture. This promises to be a lively and thought-provoking programme.'

Paul Moorhouse, Curator, Howard Hodgkin: Absent Friends, says: 'This is an important moment in the history of the National Portrait Gallery. For the first time, we are mounting an exhibition of portraits which includes paintings that appear entirely abstract. Hodgkin's portraits are very unorthodox because they represent memories and emotions rather than literal appearances. But these wonderfully sensuous and often intimate images are nevertheless entirely about people.'

Howard Hodgkin: Absent Friends is curated by Paul Moorhouse, the National Portrait Gallery's Head of Collections Displays (Victorian to Contemporary) and Senior Curator of 20th Century Portraits.