John Hodgkinson (b. 1989, Lincoln, UK) is a London-based painter whose work explores observation, architecture, and the psychological charge of constructed environments. Moving between direct study and invention, Hodgkinson isolates fragments of the built world—structural supports, architectural interiors, and utilitarian objects—often excluding the human figure while preserving traces of labor, occupation, and bodily presence. His paintings employ trompe l’oeil effects and subtle disruptions of scale and perspective, allowing familiar materials and spaces to become perceptually unstable.
In The Agency at Gratin, New York (2025), Hodgkinson approached the exhibition as a form of self-portraiture, using images associated with work, disguise, and professional identity to consider the ways a person might be represented indirectly through their surroundings. For John in California at House of Seiko, Los Angeles (2026), he presented forty approximately life-size paintings of lumber developed after a residency at a wild-horse sanctuary on California’s Central Coast. Based on his sustained observation of the sanctuary’s barns and enclosures, the works transformed structural wood into an invented vocabulary of grain, knots, and weathered surfaces, bringing American trompe l’oeil into dialogue with Minimalism and the material traditions of postwar West Coast sculpture. In Bath House at Galerie Pepe, Mexico City (2026), Hodgkinson turned to the architecture of nineteenth-century German bathhouses, creating unpopulated interiors in which platforms, archways, and massage tables oscillate between functional structures, theatrical stages, and sites of bodily memory. Across these exhibitions, Hodgkinson’s practice examines how architecture can register human presence precisely through its absence.