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12/10/2001

David Hockney

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek

David Hockney Paintings 1960-2000

A long-held wish will be coming true when Louisiana on 13 October 2001, opens its doors on a major presentation of the British-born painter David Hockney?s world. The show spans more than 40 years of Hockney?s career, from its beginning in the London of the 1960s to its present stage, in the Hollywood Hills outside Los Angeles where the artist now lives.

David Hockney - along with Henry Moore and Francis Bacon - is among the most famous British artists of the 20th century. He is admired for his technical skill, his sure sense of style and his colourful, sensual impressions of the world around him. For the very same reasons, he has at times been criticized for straying from the path laid down by late 20th-century art. Hockney has never ceased to believe in the ability of the medium of painting to convey new insights into the seen. Characterized by an all-embracing appetite for the world, his art has been as influenced by Picasso and Matisse as by his contemporaries.

This exhibition clearly shows how Hockney, right from the beginning, has responded openly to what lies before his eyes and holds fascination for him. Locations are of central importance, whether it be the London of his youth, the legendary homosexual environment in L.A. when he first stayed there, or the more recent landscapes of the Grand Canyon and Yorkshire in northern England, his place of birth.

But above all, his works are concerned with something as nearly banal as the experience of these places, people and environments - from his depictions of the humblest of flowers in a vase on a table, to the cascade of water momentarily left by jumping into a pool, to the almost impossible task of conveying the sensation of standing at the edge of that great natural phenomenon and national treasure: the Grand Canyon in the Arizona desert.

Hockney has become more and more interested in letting this subjective experience of places and things unfold within a visual space that makes the observer an active party. His organisation of this space involves the observer very directly in the experience of phenomena related to concepts such as tangibility and incomprehensibility, as well as to their psychological parallels: intimacy and distance.

Though this exhibition, the first major presentation of Hockney?s work in Scandinavia, is retrospective, the works will not be displayed in strict chronological order. Rather, the museum has chosen to emphasize certain themes that have been central to the artist throughout his life: the human figure/human existence, the rejection of a central perspective/the perspective of subjective experience, architecture and space/ the physical framework of our lives and dreams and the sensual presence of the world/beauty.

The show at Louisiana is based on loans from museums and private collectors all over the world. It has been realised in collaboration with the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle in Bonn and, not least, with the artist himself. Louisiana is in the privileged position of being able to show several major works not included in the Bonn exhibition: The Tate Gallery in London has made the most famous of the pool paintings, A Bigger Splash (1967) available to us on loan, and the loan of A Bigger Grand Canyon from the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra has made it possible for us to display Hockney?s two monumental Grand Canyon works (both dating from 1998) alongside each other.

The Louisiana Revy An exhibition catalogue will be published as a volume of the Louisiana Revy. Besides an introduction by director of the museum, Poul Erik Tøjner, it will contain the articles "The Surface of the Canvas" by Kay Heymer and "Signposts to Hockney?s Later Landscapes" by Marco Livingstone.

Hockney Day at Louisiana Symposium and film Saturday, 10 November 2001, at 10.30-16.45 This day, dedicated to Hockney, will be introduced by Poul Erik Tøjner. Afterwards, Lars Nittve, director of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, will talk about Hockney and L.A., followed by the American writer and art critic, Lawrence Weschler, who will give an introduction to David Hockney?s new book "The Secret Knowledge", in which the artist proposes some radically new theories on the old masters? use of optical devices. As the last speaker, exhibition curator Anders Kold will introduce the Hockney film "A Bigger Splash", screened at 15.00-16.45.

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
Gl. Strandvej 13, DK-3050 Humlebæk Phone: +45 4919 0719 Fax: +45 4919 3505

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