With a touring exhibition of David Hockneys’s 1969 etchings illustrating the 6 fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm starting this month we thought we should take a close look his long and ever evolving career.
David Hockney, a giant of the 20th century art landscape, rose to prominence in the 1960’s, and has remained at the forefront of the art world ever since.
He was a pivotal figure in the early Pop Art movement alongside contemporaries such as Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton. Hockney is perhaps still best known for his seminal piece A Bigger Splash (1967), however his work in landscape painting, portraiture and elsewhere has been celebrated for much of the last 50 years.
His work has embraced a rich tapestry of influences from cubism and impressionism, through to photography and computer technology as well as his investigations into the techniques used by the Old Masters as presented in the 2001 television program and book Secret Knowledge.
More recently, his relocation from Los Angeles to West Yorkshire, his birthplace and home during in his formative years, has inspired a return to landscape painting. Utilizing his famous ‘joiners’ technique he has created work on a grand scale such as Bigger Trees Near Warter Or/Ou Peinture Sur Le Motif Pour Le Nouvel Age Post-Photographique exhibited to much acclaim at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition in 2007.
This most recent work portrays the West Yorkshire landscape with breathtaking depth of compassion and perspective, and arguably will eventually take its place among the finest landscape paintings in history. This new, reinvigorated phase in his career is certain to cement Hockney’s place among other luminaries of European art such as Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon.
At over 70 he continues Hockney’s prolific output of work and shows no signs of slowing down. He is currently working toward a mammoth show of landscapes for the Royal Academy in London, to open in January 2012.
The touring show of David Hockeny’s etchings illustrating the 6 fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm is organized by the Hayward gallery and will be at the following venues 18 July - 5 September 2010Royal West of England Academy, Bristol, 11 September - 10 October 2010, Lime Tree Gallery, Fort William, 16 October - 14 November 2010, North London Collegiate School, Edgware.
