Organized by the Royal Academy of Arts in collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, David Hockney: A Bigger Picture is the first major exhibition held in Spain to celebrate the crucial role landscape plays in the career of this artist, considered the most important living British painter.
Bright landscapes inspired by his native county of Yorkshire form the core of this exhibition which, with Iberdrola’s sponsorship, brings together on the Museum’s second floor around 150 works—oil paintings, charcoals, iPad drawings, sketchbooks and digital videos—most of which have been created in the past eight years. This exhibition offers a unique vision into Hockney’s creative world and demonstrates his enormous capacity to represent nature using different techniques, as well as revealing his attachment to the landscape of his youth.
The exhibition also illustrates the extent to which the depiction of the natural environment has been present throughout the artist’s career, even when other subjects were the focus of his output. A selection of works from 1956—during his student days in Bradford—until 1998 contextualizes Hockney’s later landscapes and reveals his early preoccupation with the representation of space and his use of color and manipulation of perspective to reflect the natural world.
One of the large, petal-shaped galleries designed by Frank Gehry houses Hockney’s early works, which come from different public and private international collections and date from the late 1950s, while he was still a student, and the 1960s, such as Flight into Italy – Swiss Landscape (1962), a stylized representation of Alpine peaks. Exhibited alongside them are two of his famous photographic collages from the 1980s, Grand Canyon Looking North, Sept. 1982 and Pearblossom Highway, 11–18 April 1986 # 1, a work in which a road draws the viewer into the painting, showcasing Hockney’s experimentation with perspective and the representation of pictorial space in Cubism.
This same space with curved walls features his two paintings of the Grand Canyon, made in 1998, including the spectacular landscape A Closer Grand Canyon (1998), which is more than seven meters long. From the same year is Garrowby Hill (1998), a work created from memory in the studio after his return to Yorkshire in 1997 to spend time with his friend Jonathan Silver, who was terminally ill and had always supported his career. The drive between his mother’s house and his friend’s deathbed in the town of Wetherby familiarized Hockney further with the landscapes of his youth and inspired a deep interest in and affection for its features.
Opening and closing dates: from May 15 to September 30, 2012. Curators: Edith Devaney, Curator of Contemporary Projects at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, Marco Livingstone, Independent Curator. Sponsored by: Iberdrola
Photos from the Exhibition
About the artist
Born in Bradford in 1937, David Hockney attended the Bradford School of Art before entering the Royal College of Art, where he remained between 1959 and 1962. His classmates included Peter Blake and R. B. Kitaj. Hockney’s celebrity came while he was still a student, when his work was included in the Young Contemporaries exhibition, which marked the rise of British pop art. He visited Los Angeles in the early 1960s and settled there soon after. He is often associated with Southern California and the many works he produced there over several decades. David Hockney was elected to the Royal Academy in 1991.
David Hockney: A Bigger Picture highlights Hockney’s curiosity and energy when adopting the myriad possibilities of landscape art. Hockney works from observation and from memory and imagination, supported by visual and technological tools. His mastery of various media and always innovative approach allows him to create images that are powerful evocations of space and landscape and achieve “a bigger picture”. His deep knowledge of the masters of the past and their influence on his work are equally evident in the exhibition, as demonstrated by the use of scale to extend the view of the landscape. Above all the exhibition places Hockney firmly in the tradition of celebrated British landscape painters such as Constable, who are associated with a particular area of great natural beauty.
