David Hockney: A Bigger Picture

In January 2012 the Royal Academy of Arts will present the first major exhibition in the UK to showcase David Hockney’s landscape work. Vivid paintings inspired by Yorkshire landscape, many large in scale and created specifically for the exhibition, will be shown alongside related drawings and films. Through a selection of works spanning fifty years, this new body of work will be placed in the context of Hockney’s extended exploration of and fascination with landscape.

Highlights will include three groups of new work made since 2005, when Hockney returned to live in Bridlington, showing an intense observation of his surroundings in a variety of media. The exhibition will reveal the artist’s emotional engagement with the landscape he knew in his youth, as he examines on a daily basis the changes in the seasons, the cycle of growth and variations in light conditions. The exhibition will take the visitor on a journey through Hockney’s world.

The exhibition will address the various approaches that David Hockney has taken towards the depiction of landscape throughout his career. Past works from national and international collections will include Rocky Mountains and Tired Indians, 1965 (Acrylic on Canvas), Garrowby Hill , 1998, (Oil on Canvas) and the ambitious (Oil on 60 Canvases) A Closer Grand Canyon, 1998. David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture will also highlight the artist’s vast knowledge and research of the old masters and their techniques.

Hockney’s involvement with the depiction of space is traced in this exhibition from the 1960s, through his photocollages of the 1980s and the Grand Canyon paintings of the late 1990s, to the recent paintings of East Yorkshire, many of which have been made en plein air . He has always embraced new technologies; recently he has used the iPhone and iPad as tools for making art. A number of iPad drawings and a series of new films produced using eighteen cameras will be displayed on multiple screens, providing a spellbinding visual experience.

Born in Bradford in 1937, David Hockney attended Bradford School of Art before studying at the Royal College of Art from 1959 to 1962. Hockney’s stellar reputation was established while he was still a student; his work was featured in the exhibition Young Contemporaries, which heralded the birth of British Pop Art. He visited Los Angeles in the early 1960s and settled there soon after. He is closely associated with southern California and has produced a large body of work there over many decades. David Hockney was elected a Royal Academician in 1991.

ORGANISATION

David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture has been organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne. The exhibition has been curated by the independent curator Marco Livingstone and Edith Devaney, the Royal Academy of Arts.

David Hockney
A Bigger Picture
Kuratoren: Marco Livingstone, Edith Devaney