David Hockney “Something New in Painting (and Photography) [and even Printing]”

The Pace Gallery (510 W 25th St)

[Image: David Hockney "Still Life" (2017) acrylic on canvas, 36 x 72 in. (hexagonal) © David Hockney Photo credit: Richard Schmidt.]

This event has ended.

Pace Gallery presents an exhibition of new works by David Hockney. Following the artist’s celebrated traveling retrospective at Tate Britain, the Centre Pompidou, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Pace’s exhibition Something New in Painting (and Photography) [and even Printing] will be on view from April 5 to May 12, 2018 at 508/510 West 25th Street. Pace will publish a catalogue to accompany the exhibition that includes an essay by art historian and Hockney scholar Lawrence Weschler.

The exhibition includes 18 new paintings, the majority of which are painted on hexagonal canvases. The works depict a wide range of subjects – from the deck of the artist’s Hollywood Hills home to Nichols Canyon all the way to the Grand Canyon and East Yorkshire with fantasy landscapes along the way. The varying subject matter, often reprises of earlier work, do not recede to a single vanishing point but instead are all depicted in reverse perspective. Having continually experimented with the representation of three-dimensional space, the hexagonal canvases add a structural element to the artist’s efforts to transcend the limitations of conventional perspective.

As its title suggests, the exhibition will also include two of the artist’s latest works in computer manipulated photography. A continuation of his earlier work with composite polaroids and multi-screen videos, Hockney has digitally combined photographs taken from many perspectives into single monumental images. As in the exhibition’s paintings, the composite photographs do not follow the dogmatic logic of single point perspective but instead embrace multiple experiences of space. Having always been interested in new media, these two monumental prints are an exciting extension of Hockney’s experimentation with reverse perspective into other media beyond painting.

Expanding on its presentation of Hockney’s new work, Pace Gallery will dedicate its booth at Frieze New York, on view from May 3 to May 6, to a presentation of Hockney’s most recent iPhone and iPad drawings thus continuing the gallery’s tradition of organizing ambitious solo exhibitions for major artists at Frieze New York.

David Hockney (b. 1937, Bradford, United Kingdom) has produced some of the most vividly recognizable images of this century. Hockney’s ongoing exploration of figuration and abstraction reveals a fundamental interest in the representation of pictorial space. His aesthetic pursuits stretch across a vast range of media, from the traditions of painting and printmaking to full-scale opera stagings, photographic collage, and the incorporation of digital technologies such as fax machines, video, and iPads. Spanning practice and theory, Hockney’s investigation of artistic techniques has also developed through art-historical research, resulting in Secret Knowledge (2001), his publication on the optical devices used by the Old Masters, as well as A History of Pictures: From the Cave to the Computer Screen (2016), written in collaboration with art critic Martin Gayford and further exploring the many ways artists have pictured the world.

Hockney has been the subject of 400 solo exhibitions held at numerous international institutions. He has been the subject of several retrospectives, including one organized in 1988 by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which then traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Tate Gallery, London and the recent exhibition David Hockney which traveled to Tate Britain, London (2017); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2017); and recently closed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2018).

Notable recent exhibitions include 82 Portraits and 1 Still Life, which opens at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on April 15th, 2018; the show was organized by the Royal Academy, London (2016) and travelled to Ca’ Pesaro, Venice (2017), Guggenheim Bilbao (2017); A Bigger Picture (2012), organized by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, that travelled to Guggenheim Bilbao (2012), Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2012 – 2013); A Bigger Exhibition, de Young Museum, San Francisco (2014); Current, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2016); Happy Birthday, Mr. Hockney at The Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2017).

Hockney’s work has been featured in the Biennale de Paris (1961, 1963, 1985, 1989); Biennale of Prints, National Museum of Art, Tokyo (1962); International Biennale, Hong Kong (1963); Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (1967, 1982); Biennale de São Paulo (1967, 1975); Venice Biennale (1968, 1989, 1995); Documenta, Kassel (1968, 1977, 2005); and the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial, New York (2004).

Hockney’s works are held in public collections across the globe, including Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Centre Pompidou, Paris; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Louisiana Museum of Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museu Colecção Berardo, Lisbon; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tehran; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; National Portrait Gallery, London; Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate, London; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, among others.

Hockney has received accolades throughout his career, including nine honorary degrees from academic institutions worldwide. Among his honors, Hockney received a Guinness Award (1961), was elected Associate Member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London (1986), and made an Associate Member of the Academie Royale, Brussels (1987). He was made a Foreign Honorary Member by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1997. In the same year was awarded the Order of the Companion of Honour by Queen Elizabeth II, as well as the Culture Prize of the German Society for Photography, Germany’s highest award in the field of photography. In 2003 he was bestowed with the Lorenzo de Medici Lifetime Career Award at the Florence Biennale. Hockney was appointed to the Order of Merit by Queen Elizabeth II in 2012 and has been asked to design a 20 foot by 6 foot stained-glass window for Westminster Abbey in Her Majesty’s honor.

David Hockney has been represented by Pace since 2008. Significant exhibitions of his work at the gallery include Paintings 2006–2009 (2009); The Arrival of Spring (2014, 2015); Some New Painting (and Photography) (2014–15); and The Yosemite Suite (2016, 2017).