David Hockney RA: A bigger picture

It’s on, it’s brilliant and worth all the hype.

Ok I admit it, I love David Hockney’s work and always have.  It evolves and grows with him, he isn’t stuck in the twentieth century but has embraced  new technology and made it his own. You cannot help but be excited by the works as you enter the galleries the paintings are large and being mostly landscapes are very green. This is not just any green but a bright, pulsating, verdant lushness that surrounds the viewer. There is a great deal of sunshine, egg yolk and corn yellow in the works as well. The feel is Fauvist, or impressionistic.

Well you have had my emotional response to  this exhibition and now for what its curators say about it.

The exhibition addresses the various approaches that Hockney has taken towards the depiction of landscape through out his career. His exploration of space is traced from work dating to his time as a student, through his photo collages of the 1980′s and Grand Canyon paintings of the late 1990′s to recent paintings of East Yorkshire.

The exhibition reveals the artist’s emotional engagement with the landscape he knew in his youth, as, in a series of galleries each dedicated to a particular motif or vista he examines daily variations in light, weather conditions cycles of growth and decay and the changing seasons.

The exhibition culminates in the largest of the Royal Academy’s galleries, with the immersive work ‘ The arrival of Spring in Woldgate East Yorkshire in 2011′. Hockney’s glorious homage to nature is dominated by a painting on 32 canvases, surrounded by over fifty large-scale ipad  drawings printed on paper, which chronicle the advancing season in breathtaking detail. Hockney has found the ultimate subject for a bigger picture.

 

David Hockney

A Closer Winter Tunnel, February–March, 2006

Oil on six canvases

182.9 x 365.8 cm overall

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. Purchased with funds provided by

Geoff and Vicki Ainsworth, the Florence and William Crosby Bequest and the

Art Gallery of New South Wales Foundation, 2007

© David Hockney / Collection of Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Photo credit: Richard Schmidt

 

Exhibition organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London in collaboration with

the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne