David Hockney at MET NY
For 60 years, David Hockney (British, 1937) has pursued a singular career with a love for painting, passion for colour and intrinsic challenges.
A major retrospective at New York Metropolitan Museum honours the artist in his 80th birthday.
Painting with great wit and intelligence, Hockney, has questioned how to capture the world of movement, space and time in two dimensions. The show includes painting, drawing, photography and video.
From his early engagement with modernist abstraction and experiments with illusion and realism, to his most recent, jewel-toned landscapes, Hockney has consistently explored the nature of perception representation with intellectual rigor and sheer delight.
He is distinguished by early successes and flaunting social and artistic conventions. Some works brazenly reference homoerotic subject matter, while his dedication to figuration runs against the grain of world trends.
Hockney’s early works from California and portraits from Los Angeles, New York and London, show the artist’s interest in the tension at social relationships and the difficulty of depicting transparent material such as glass and water.
Hockney turned to a brightly hued palette and fractured, cubistic perspective that mirrors his interest in Picasso and his own experiments with Polaroid photography. Lately, Hockney ventured outdoors to paint the changeable landscapes across the seasons, while returning to study figure groupings.
Keenly interested in scientific innovations in the aid of art, he recently experimented with an old technology: creating portrait drawings using a camera lucida, first employed by Renaissance artists to render one-point perspective. He always embraced new technologies, such as colourful experimental compositions with iPhone and iPad apps. His most recent, neon- toned landscapes, painted in California, where he lives since 2013.
The show is a collaboration between Tate Britain (London), Centre Pompidou (Paris) and Metropolitan Museum (NY).
