Something New … Continued
The year begins with Hockney’s 21st solo show at L.A. Louver gallery in Venice, California, Something New in Painting (and Photography) [and even Printing] ... Continued. As the title suggests, the works on view present recent developments in Hockney’s decades-long exploration of visual representation through different mediums, often in combination. Two mural-length composite images—the “photographic drawings” Pictures at an Exhibition and Pictured Gathering at Mirror (both 2018)—show sitters arranged across his Los Angeles studio, contemplating either paintings on the wall or their own reflected image. The sitters were captured at different points in time and collaged together using digital software to create a collective experience of viewing; at L.A. Louver, the nearly 30-foot-long works are hung on opposite sides of the gallery, placing visitors in the midst of the group. In both images, Hockney himself appears at one end of the studio, smoking a cigarette and surveying the scene.
We’re living in a time when pictures are changing. … I’ve started here, other people will take it up. For example, in my photographic montages of the studio with multiple chairs, each chair is photographed separately … and so you have to look at each chair in isolation. And the time it takes it takes to do that makes the space. … If you think about it, you can’t really have space without time, and so the end of time will be the end of space. This life is a mystery to me; people are mysterious. I think they are. We all are.
Portrait Drawings on Canvas
Something New … Continued also includes single portraits of friends and new acquaintances, from his assistants Jonathan Wilkinson and Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima to the young pop stars Bruno Mars and Ed Sheeran.
The Joy of Nature
At the start of March, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam opens Hockney–Van Gogh: The Joy of Nature, for the first time dedicating its special exhibitions wing to a contemporary artist. The Joy of Nature makes vivid the connections between Van Gogh’s exuberant landscapes and Hockney’s boldly imaginative ouevre—from his sketchbooks to his large-scale paintings, photographs, moving-image works, and iPad drawings. Reviewing the exhibition in the Brooklyn Rail, Joyce Beckenstein elucidates the two artists’ pairing: “The 11 Van Gogh works on view representing the Dutch artist’s Arles period follow his flight from the beclouded Netherlands to Paris, then on to Arles in southern France. Once he saw nature through the prism of dazzling light, he abandoned the earthy dank palette of his iconic Potato Eaters (1885) to revel in a swirl of cobalt-blue skies and golden wheatfields. Hockney made the 64 landscapes featured in this exhibition when he relocated from his adopted home in Los Angeles, California to his native Yorkshire in 2004, a move which allowed him to see anew the sooty grey skies he recalled from childhood, and to begin a late-career love fest with nature."
[Van Gogh] makes you see the world around just a little more intensely. And you enjoy seeing it like that, or I do.
Normandy
During 2019, Hockney began visiting Normandy to draw the landscape of Northern France. In September, a show of these recent works, La Grande Cour, inaugurates PACE gallery’s new headquarters in New York’s Chelsea district. Hockney’s drawings depict the arrival of the Norman spring in precisely captured moments, and in one case collected as an expansive 24-panel panorama. [NESTED]These landscapes speak especially to his renewed fascination with the Bayeux tapestry as a medieval depiction of multiple narratives and temporalities within the one pictorial field.
Every time we get the spring I get thrilled. … This was a big theme, and one I could confidently do: the infinite variety of nature.
Exhibitions
Solo
- Hockney – Van Gogh: The Joy of Nature, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (Mar 1–May 26); catalogue.
- David Hockney's Yosemite, Monterey Museum of Art, Monterey, CA, USA (Apr 25–Aug 4).
- Films by James Scott, Etchings by David Hockney, Anita Rogers Gallery, New York, NY USA (Jun 19–Jul 27).
- David Hockney's Yosemite and Masters of California Basketry, Heard Museum, Phoenix (Oct 28, 2019–Jun 28, 2020).
Group
- The Dog: A Celebration at Chatsworth, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, UK (Mar 23–Oct 6); catalogue.
- Dearest Sweet Love: Christopher Isherwood & Don Bachardy, Schwules Museum, Berlin (Jun 14–Aug 26).
- Opéra Monde, Centre Pompidou Metz, Metz, France (Jun 22, 2019–Jan 27, 2020).
- Ut Pictura Poesis: Walt Whitman and the Poetry of Art, Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida (Sep 21–Dec 29).
- Made in California, Robert and Frances Fullerton Museum of Art, San Bernardino, CA USA (Oct 3–Dec 7).
- Alan Davie and David Hockney: Early Works, The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield, West Yorkshire, UK (Oct 19, 2019–Jan 19, 2020); catalogue.
Publications
Publications
- David Hockney, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea.
- David Hockney Something New in Painitng (and Photography) [and even Printing]... Continued, L A Louver, Venice, California.
- Alan Davie & David Hockney. Early Works, edited by Eleanor Clayton & Helen Little, London: Lund Humphries / The Hepworth Wakefield.
- Hockney - Van Gogh, The Joy of Nature, by Hans den Hartog Jager, Amsterdam: The Van Gogh Museum.
- La Grande Cour Normandy, by David Hockney, New York: Pace Gallery.