Art
in the City
by the Art Club
David Hockney at the Bucerius
www.buceriuskunstforum.de/david-hockney
Exhibition: Now until May 10
biggest hole” in Hockney’s words.
Whether an act of Torschlusspanik or the
inauguration of a new era of cultural co-
operation, a show organized with Lon-
don’s Tate Museum opened on Brexit
Day, Jan. 31, at the Bucerius Kunst Fo-
rum: the first major exhibition in Ger-
many of the work of David Hockney.
Currently the second most expensive
living painter in the world, Hockney is,
next to Banksy, probably the most fa-
mous contemporary British artist.
Spanning 60 years of the artist’s work,
the show is arranged chronologically.
However, it begins with a premiere of
the Tate’s most recent acquisition. A gift
to the museum from the artist, In the
Studio, December 2017 is a stock-taking
response to the large retrospective of
Hockney’s life’s work at the Tate in 2017,
as well as to a mammoth Taschen coffee
table book on Hockney’s art from 2016.
The latter, so large that it comes with its
own colorful Hockney table, appears in
the foreground of the picture and can be
ordered in the Bucerius shop for €2500.
The monumental “photographic draw-
ing” of Hockney standing in his Los
Angeles studio was created by “digitally
stitching” together 3000 manipulated
photos. It is a good example of Hock-
30
In Hamburg
ney’s ever-creative “painting” with the
aid of mechanical devices, for example,
lithographs created with xerox and fax
technology. Hockney’s innovative iPad
and iPhone paintings unfortunately are
not part of this show.
The multiple perspectives, along with
the shaped canvases depicted on the stu-
dio walls reflect Hockney’s efforts since
the 1980s to develop new ways of mak-
ing his viewers feel as if they were ex-
ploring a flat painted scene in 3-dimen-
sions with the pictorial space seeming
to extend out and encom-
pass them. A large sec-
tion of the exhibition is
devoted to Hockney’s ex-
uberant but somewhat ac-
ademic experimentation
with this “moving focus”
in large lithographs, a
room-divider screen, and
the monumental A Closer
Grand Canyon of 1998—a
composite of multiple
painted views in blazing
reds, yellows and pinks
unfolds to give the view-
er a sense of teetering at
the edge of the “world’s
by Holly T.
cm,
David Hockney, A Closer Grand Canyon, 1998, oil on canvas, 205.5 x 744.2 cm, Louisiana Museum of
Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark. Exhibition view photo by Ulrich Perrey
Influenced by Picasso’s Cubism in this
pursuit, Hockney’s art became as ab-
stract as it will ever be. It is his astute
combination of figuration and abstrac-
tion, however, for which the classically
trained painter is best known. Much of
his work reflects the experience of being
gay in the 20th century, beginning with
images like Doll Boy of 1960/61 from the
Hamburg Kunsthalle, where the painter
evokes the oozing walls and coded graf-
fiti in London Underground toilets or
“tea rooms” where—at the time still ille-
gal—homosexual encounters took place.
His Rake’s Progress etching cycle based
on Hogarth, humorously records the
artist’s initial bedazzlement and subse-
quent slide to debauchery in 1961 on his
first trip to New York. Lured next to Los
Angeles by its flourishing gay communi-
ty, Hockney created iconic images of the
city’s “sexy culture, vibrant sunshine,
modernist buildings and many pools.”
He portrayed pop culture literati, to
which he himself belonged, on huge can-
vases that placed the viewer in a trian-
gular relationship with the work. We are
lucky to be able to see an extraordinary
one of these now in Hamburg—the mar-
riage portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Clark and
Percy, 1970–71 is the most popular work
at the Tate and almost never loaned to
other museums.