VENICE

Howard Hodgkin is a leading British contemporary currently represented here by a dozen large graphics, mainly works made in India using handmade paper and fabric dyes. Despite exotic sources and materials, Hodgkin’s work has more to do with European drawing rooms than the Taj Mahal.

At a glance, these compositions appear to be bold and lively abstract arrangements of blobs and hatchings. Soon, however, deft, minimal pictorial allusion transforms most of them into domestic interiors with witty and autobiographical overtones.

“After Lunch” is typical with its suggestion of light falling through louvered shutters and striking a polka-dot couch. It is impossible to dislike this work. Hodgkin is a veritable whiz at effortless composition and orchestration of such unlikely color combinations as blues and rusts. His urbanity recalls David Hockney. Hodgkin has great fun calling a writhing field of poisonous green blobs, “Snake,” or evoking a slightly artificial tropical garden in “For Bernard Jacobson.”

Intimist echos here are in the spirit of Vuillard. They are also in the spirit of the character in “Brideshead Revisited” who suggested that British art sometimes suffers from a surfeit of its own charm. (L.A. Louver Gallery, 55 N. Venice Blvd., to Feb. 2.)