After the stop in Venice, realized with the support of Crédit Agricole FriulAdria, the exhibition will be hosted at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. English by birth but Californian by adoption, David Hockney is one of the greatest artists contemporary figurative. Born in the industrial town of Bradford in 1937, after training at the Bradford School of Art he moved to London to attend the Royal College of Art (1959-1962). From his participation in 1961 in the London Young Contemporaries exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery together with other students of the Royal College such as Allan Jones and RB Kitaj, he gained a certain fame among specialized critics and met his first success with the public.
His first trip to the United States dates back to 1961, to New York and then in 1964 to Los Angeles, the metropolis of which he will become an interpreter and painter, translating the atmosphere of American life into very famous works with backgrounds saturated with the dazzling Californian light. The figurative element plays a pivotal role in his production, declined in the genres of portrait and landscape, associated with a constant interaction between traditional artistic techniques and new media. From pastel drawings to oil paintings, from photographic collages with different points of view to laser printers, up to iPad drawings, Hockney incessantly portrays the life that surrounds him, distilling the essence of people, capturing the movement of water and unfolding the spectacular nature of the landscapes.
Painted between 2013 and 2016, and considered by the artist to be a single body of work, the eighty-two portraits exhibited at Ca' Pesaro offer a vision of Hockney's life in Los Angeles, his relationships with the international art world, with gallery owners, critics, curators, artists, famous faces such as John Baldessari, Larry Gagosian and Stephanie Barron, but also family members and people who have become part of his daily life. Hockney executes each portrait under the same conditions: the realization time is three days, or as the artist says «twenty hours of exposure», during which each subject takes a seat on a chair, placed on a platform, with the same neutral background. The eighty-two canvases, all of the same format, bring together a taxonomy of types and characters, a visual essay on the human form and condition that transcends classifications of gender, identity and nationality. Within the apparently limited format of the figure seated on a two-tonal background, an infinite range of human temperaments is fragmented and expressed, testifying, once again, to the greatness of this master of our contemporaneity.
Image: David-Hockney-Edith-Devaney-©-David-Hockney
