Always an itinerant artist, throughout his career Howard Hodkgin frequently returned to the foreign and the exotic in his paintings. Searing temperatures, striking flora and fauna, erotic encounters, and heady atmospheres are ever present in these works, capturing memories nostalgic and passionate in equal measure. In 2007 and 2008, Hodgkin painted a series of works on the American dream including Transatlantic, 2007, exploring the mythologies and promises of the land of liberty and freedom. Whilst previously drawn to Egypt, Italy, France, and India, the pull of America, and the legacy of American abstract painting, was ultimately and inevitably magnetic for Hodgkin, as a foremost international contemporary abstract painter. Consistently treading a delicate line between figuration and abstraction – with the start and endpoint of each painting a specific subject but realised with his idiomatic patterned brushwork – Hodgkin has termed himself “a representational painter, but not a painter of appearances. I paint representational pictures of emotional situations.” Despite the six decades that divides the height of Abstract Expressionism with Transatlantic, the allure of America for Hodgkin demonstrates the continued influence of the New York School. The expanse, ambition and epic quality of Abstract Expressionism filters into Hodgkin’s own work, the overarching vision of the project and the enormity of the scale are inescapable for all subsequent abstract artists. Hodgkin, however, transforms the epic quality of such American abstraction into his quintessential idiomatic style in Transatlantic. Grandeur is distilled into the intimacy of a small-scale work painted on a wooden board. Hodgkin frequently incorporated found wooden frames into his paintings – in Transatlantic he utilises a reclaimed breadboard for the support. And, despite the formidable presence of Abstract Expressionism, a certain legacy of the English landscape painting tradition persists in the Turner-esque qualities of atmosphere and light in Transatlantic, the capturing of natural elements suggestive of sea, sky, and sun through spontaneous, expressionistic brushstrokes. Distilling the legacy of American abstraction and the tradition of English romanticism through a vitally contemporary and individual vision, Transatlantic is a work of immense maturity and enduring resonance.