Hockney; exhibition to go to

March 22nd- September 24th, 2024

MUSÉE DES BEAUX-ARTS Rouen, France

David Hockney (born July 9, 1937, in Bradford) is an English artist and one of the most prominent figures of pop art. His painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) from 1972 was sold at auction in 2018 for 90 million dollars (79 million euros), at that time a record amount for a work by a living artist.

Development

David Hockney studied at the Bradford School of Art from 1953 to 1957, where he initially painted canvases with an anecdotal character. In 1964, he moved to California where he developed a more realistic painting style. From that moment on, he no longer used oil paint but worked exclusively in acrylic. Common themes in his work include swimming pools, portraits, and landscapes. One of his most famous works is the canvas A Bigger Splash (1967) (in the collection of Tate Britain, London), depicting a swimming pool. He also frequently painted his two dachshunds, Boogie and Stanley, expressions of homosexual love, and still lifes.

Several years later, he began incorporating photos into his paintings, marking the beginning of numerous collages composed of photos assembled in a cubist manner. The aim of these collages was to demonstrate that single images are limited: in a standard photo, it's never possible to capture what someone sees when looking at a three-dimensional object. To somewhat rectify this, Hockney attempts to capture the more three-dimensional reality in a faithful manner with these joiners (so named for the merging of different photos).

In the 1990s, after the death of his mother, Hockney returned to Yorkshire, England, with his partner, where he began painting the characteristic landscape there. In 2012-2013, a retrospective of these works was exhibited at the Royal Academy in London, the Guggenheim in Bilbao, and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.

Under the motto 'Do remember they can’t cancel the spring,' he began creating iPad paintings of the burgeoning spring in Normandy during the first lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic. From October 2021 to January 2022, these were exhibited at the BOZAR in Brussels during the major dual exhibition: Works from the Tate Collection, 1954-2017 and The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020.

Hockney is known to have synesthesia, a condition in which one can see or taste music or words as colors.

In 2012, Queen Elizabeth II awarded Hockney the Order of Merit.