Born in London in 1932, Howard Hodgkin was evacuated during the war to the United States, where he lived on Long Island from 1940 to 1943. He studied at the Camberwell School of Art and the Bath Academy of Art, Corsham. In 1984 he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale and in the following year won the Turner Prize. He was knighted in 1992 and made a Companion of Honour in 2003.

An exhibition of his Paintings 1975-1995, organized by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, opened in 1995 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and toured to museums in Fort Worth and Düsseldorf, and to London's Hayward Gallery. A retrospective opened at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, in spring 2006. It traveled to London's Tate Britain and then to El Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. A survey exhibition of paintings made in the last 15 years opened at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven in February 2007, and is on at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge until September 23. A touring print show organized by the Barbican Art Gallery is on at the Victoria Art Gallery, Bath between July 28 and September 30. It will later travel to Belfast.

Sir Howard first worked in the theater in 1981, when he designed the set and costumes for Richard Alston's Night Music with the Ballet Rambert. They later collaborated on Pulcinella, which was filmed by the BBC and released on DVD. Mark Morris asked Sir Howard to design the backcloth for Rhymes with Silver (1997) and for Kolam (2002).

Howard Hodgkin is represented by Gagosian Gallery in New York, Los Angeles, and London.

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