(6 Feb 2017) DAVID HOCKNEY EXHIBITION TO OPEN AT TATE BRITAIN
It's not often an artist finds himself occupying 12 rooms of London's leading museum of British art and the front page of populist tabloid The Sun. But David Hockney is unique.
For curators of a major retrospective opening this week at Tate Britain , Hockney is an innovator whose 60-year career has taken in sketching, painting, printmaking, photography and digital iPad experiments. His depictions of sun-dappled Los Angeles swimming pools and wooded Yorkshire hills are among the best-known images in contemporary art.
"It starts in the 1960s when he just arrived at the Royal College of Art when he takes on '60s abstraction and turns it into something kind of queer, a sort of gay propaganda, he calls it," explained Chris Stephens, curator of the Tate exhibition, which opens Thursday.
"And then you see him in different ways, in different periods exploring how you engage with the world, how you describe the world in pictures, while also kind of engaging in a debate about what art is, so a lot of the times in the '60s he sort of satirizing abstraction as well, taking some of the rules of abstraction and making I think for him a more interesting and more human by making it about places and people."
Stephens said that Hockney has always embraced challenges presented by technology.
"He arrived from the beginning as being fascinated by finding new ways of making pictures," he said.
"All through his career he's engaged with something new. So when sophisticated color photocopies came in, he started making prints with a photocopier, feeding a sheet through so you get these layered images. When faxes came in he started sending pictures to friends by fax; and then of course when the iPhone and iPad came along, he started making drawings, initially just to send to people and then later kind of presented them in exhibitions as they are here."
Hockney's iPad drawings fill the final room of the exhibition, which contains some 250 works in all: drawings, paintings in acrylic and oil, photo collages and videos. The oldest piece is a teenage self-portrait from 1954. The most recent paintings of his LA home were completed in 2016.
Stephens said Hockney has spent his career trying to answer a fundamental question: "what it is to make pictures, why make pictures, how do you capture the real world of time and movement in something flat and static?"
Hockney left gray Britain for southern California in the 1960s, and strove to capture the intense LA light and the rippling surface of swimming pools in paintings like "A Bigger Splash."
Later, he experimented with photography. Not single photographs, which Hockney has dismissed as "looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed cyclops." Instead, he combined scores of photos into large, multi-perspective collages of landscapes including the Grand Canyon and the iconically American "Pearblossom Highway."
Art critic Estelle Lovatt thinks Hockney's popularity is down to how "generous" he is.
"He uses color, he uses the camera, he uses film in the most exceptional and unimaginable ways and he has this great imagination and this great power to put on 2D what is actually 3D and he actually confuses us and he plays with us and he cajoles with us and he wants us to step through the canvas with him, or through the photograph with him. We are part of the artwork," she said.
Alongside Hockney's artistic journey, the exhibition charts how a gay, working-class youth from the unfashionable north of England went from outsider to national treasure.
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