Photograph
and copyright by Manfredi Bellati
“I
like to live in the now.”
David
Hockney
London
Now: Tate Britain – David Hockney Exhibition.
The David Hockney exhibition, until May 29, at Tate Britain, in
consultation with the artist, has been developed by Tate curators Chris
Stephens and Andrew Wilson, assisted by Helen Little, and celebrates one of the
most popular and influential British artists of the twentieth century for his
most comprehensive exhibition yet. As he approaches his 80th birthday, this
exhibition gathers together an extensive selection of David Hockney’s most
famous works celebrating his achievements in painting, drawing, print,
photography and video across six decades.
Above: A Bigger Splash - 1967
Photograph
and copyright by Manfredi Bellati
“With
his flamboyant appearance and manner, David Hockney seemed to epitomize the
fresh ‘swinging’ culture emerging in London during the first half of the 1960s.
Yet, while the period may be legendary for developments in music and fashion,
it also, more obscurely, witnessed significant innovations in the rarefied
field of philosophical aesthetics.”
Martin
Hammer
Self
Portrait – 30th Sept. - 1983
David
Hockney, is an English and moving memorable painter, draughtsman, printmaker,
stage designer and photographer. An important contributor to the pop art
movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British
artists of the twentieth century.
Photographs
and copyright by Manfredi Bellati
American
Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman) – 1968
American
art collectors Fred and Marcia Weisman outside their modernist Los Angeles
house with sculptures by British artists Henry Moore and William Turnbull in
the garden.
Photographs
and copyright by Manfredi Bellati
Mr and Mrs Clark and
Percy – 1970-71
Fashion designer Ossie Clark and
textile designer Celia Birtwell with their cat in their Notting Hill
home shortly after their wedding.
Christopher Isherwood and Don
Bachardy – 1968
English novelist and playwright Christopher
Isherwood and his partner artist Don Bachardy, in their Californian
home.
Towards
Naturalism. Towards the end of the 1960s, naturalistic representations of the
human figure became a key element in Hockney’s work. Drawn from psychological
and emotional implications of two figures within enclosed settings, Hockney
worked directly from a circle of friends and acquaintances in a series of
double portraits that capture their intimate and often complex relationships.
Photographs
and copyright by Manfredi Bellati
Henry
Geldzahler and Christopher Scott – 1969 – detail
The
figure in the center is Henry Geldzahler friend of Hockney and at the time
curator of Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum, New York. His partner, painter Christopher Scott looks
on.
Photographs
and copyright by Manfredi Bellati
Portrait
of an Artist (Pool with two Figures) – 1972
Painted
at the time of their break-up, Hockney’s then boyfriend, artist Peter
Schlesinger, looks down at the figure of John St Clair, one of Hockney’s
assistants, swimming underwater.
Photographs
and copyright by Manfredi Bellati
Pacific
Coast Highway and Santa Monica – 1990
In
the late 1990s Hockney produced paintings of the landscapes of East Yorkshire
and the Grand Canyon and his house and garden in the Hollywood Hills. Pacific
Coast Highway and Santa Monica is organized as a sequence of stage flats or
planes, each describing different qualities of space and looking – and, despite
the title, the journey for the eye of the viewer is very different here when
compared to the earlier journey paintings.
The
Road to Thwing, July 2006
The
Wolds. In 2006 Hockney returned to his native Yorkshire to paint the changing
light, space and landscape of the Wolds.
Works such as the above and A Closer Winter Tunnel, February-March 2006
show that he was painting on larger canvases, sometimes moving between several
before assembling them to create the effect of a single image.
Photographs
and copyright by Manfredi Bellati
Hawthorn
Blossom near Rudston - 2008
“Artist thought the optical projection of nature was
verisimilitude, which is what they were aiming for,” He said, “But in the 21st century, I know
that is not verisimilitude. Once you
know that, when you go out to paint, you’ve got something else to do. I do not think the world looks like
photographs. I think it looks more
glorious than that.”
David Hockney
Photographs
and copyright by Manfredi Bellati
The Four Seasons – Woldgate Woods - Spring - 2010-2011
In
2008 Hockney began making multi-screen video works by fixing a number of
cameras (one for each screen in the final work) to the outside of a vehicle,
which was driven along a road at Woldgate, near Bridlington, Yorkshire. The result was like a cubist film, showing
different aspects of the same scene as perceived by a moving observer.
