David Hockney’s exhibition in Vienna
First major retrospective in Austria for David Hockney, celebrated British contemporary artist who was already beginning a life as a pop star. 120 works on display and yes, there are swimming pools too
To welcome us to the exhibition of David Hockney (Bradford, 1937) at the Kunstforum in Vienna are his Californian paintings, the famous dips in the pool, which convey the feeling of eternal vacation and freedom. In fact, in Los Angeles he discovers a liberal society, in which homosexuality is not a taboo as in England, where until 1976 it was still considered a criminal offense. In the first rooms of the exhibition, in addition to the production of the Californian years, we find some of the great couple portraits, including the famous portrait of the parents, My parents, from 1977, in which the references to the history of art stand out. For example the reflection of a postcard from Baptism of Christ of Piero della Francesca in the mirror that recalls the Christian values of the parents, or, on the shelf, the catalog of Chardin, a French painter of the eighteenth century who is used as a model for the composition of this intimate interior.
HOCKNEY BETWEEN NATURE AND TECHNOLOGY
Hockney sees landscapes and portraits as “people”, vital and in constant motion. Numerous landscapes are present in the exhibition, also conveyed by the immense multichannel film installation The four seasons, Woldgate Wood, which highlights the silent landscape of Yorkshire, Hockney’s homeland. Each season was filmed with nine cameras recording the landscape through the woods.
The artist has always been a curious fruit of new technologies, which already in the Eighties had led him to create the “art faxes”, works that he sent by fax. On display the most modern drawings via iPhone and iPad, which he begins producing at the beginning of 2000. He recently created landscapes of Normandy during the long months of lockdown.
Hockney’s inventiveness and stylistic pluralism can already be distinguished in the years he spent at the Royal College of Art in London. In the first works of him you come Tea painting in an illusionistic style or Flight to Italy – Swiss landscapeHockney explores the boundaries between representativeness and abstraction, elevating everyday objects, such as tea bags, a subject of his large-format paintings.
Hockney continues his comparison with the portraitas evidenced by the large-format work In The Studio, December 2017, a panoramic color photographic image of the artist standing in his studio in the Hollywood Hills. It is the result of producing over three thousand photographs of the studio digitally stitched together for what the artist drew as a “photographic design”. The studio is both a place of artistic creation and a self-referential subject, the place where Hockney’s constant questioning and acute observation are translated into images and refer to significant precursors such as Henri Matisse and Gustave Courbet, who represent their atelier.
PRINT AND ENGRAVING IN THE ART OF HOCKNEY
We then delve into darker sales consecrated to engravings, a technique that the artist begins to experiment from the Sixties. We find a large network of references, the early “heroes” of his career as Mahatma Gandhi and Walt Whitman next to a self-portrait. Enthusiastic about the possibilities of print, Hockney put the emphasis on it, considering the results of his investigation with respect to painting. In the exhibition, the most important cycles are The progress of a rake And Illustrations for fourteen poems by CP Cavafy. Of the latter series, dedicated to the Greek poet Kavafis and the myth of love Efebo, only four of the illustrations are set in a Middle Eastern background. To capture the mood and intrinsic sensuality of the poem, Hockney decided to use his own personal experiences.
REPRESENTATION AND REALITY ACCORDING TO HOCKNEY
Hockney’s practice reflects his deep knowledge of art history, always aware that art is not, or shouldn’t be, a representation of realityas he himself states: “I’m saying we’re not really sure what the world is like. A lot of people think we know, but I don’t“.
Despite this statement, it can be seen that this “not knowing” led Hockney to an artistic research extremely rich in possible answers, that the exhibition presents works through the key of his long and vast production.
– Giorgia Losio