© David Hockney/Courtesy Annely Juda Fine Art

David Hockney, "Margaret Hockney" (2008). Inkjet-printed computer drawing on paper, 44 x 29½ in.

© David Hockney/Courtesy Annely Juda Fine Art

David Hockney, "Summer Sky" (2008). Inkjet-printed computer drawing on paper, 34¼ x 45½ in.

September 2009 Reviews

Richard Artschwager

Wilhelm Sasnal

Paul McCarthy

Tris Vonna-Michell

Group Show

Douglas Coupland

Jim Hodges

David Hockney Contemporary Art 2009 in Review: Auctions The Appendix: The Artwork of the Decade and a Special 75th Birthday Present The Appendix: Portraits of a Marriage, a Man in a Speedo, and Jesse Helms Warhols Send Sotheby’s Soaring New York Sales Preview Royal Bank of Scotland to Open Art Collection to Public

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David Hockney has long been a player in the world of photography, both in theory and practice. Typical of his daring use of the medium is the work Pearblossom Hwy., 11-18th April 1986, No. 2, one of his largest photocollages, measuring 10 feet wide by 6 feet tall. It is a patchwork of photo-lab prints of a single subject, in one slightly disjointed composite image. Hockney created most of these photomontage works between 1970 and 1986, and he referred to them as "joiners," an idea that confronted what he believed was the fleeting nature of the photographic image. By challenging the monocular, single-frame image that one was accustomed to, his joiners were intended to keep the viewer’s eye on the image longer. Then, in 2001, he argued in Secret Knowledge that for the past 500 years, artists in the West have always used optics and lenses to aid their work, therefore presenting the world in photographic terms. Although Hockney has given up using photography — in the strict sense — as a medium, he has always welcomed and experimented with constantly evolving technologies in imagemaking, including using Xerox and, more recently, iPhones.

Hockney’s recent exhibition, "Drawing in a Printing Machine," at London’s Annely Juda Fine Art, takes the viewer to the periphery of photography. The exhibition fills two floors: The top floor is dedicated to landscapes and the bottom to portraits. The landscapes have a closer connection to photography. There are views of rural farmlands, winding roads, and small, quaint town centers — scenes from Yorkshire, where Hockney grew up and currently resides. The colors are of his signature brightness, with vivid greens that fight for density and depth within the frame. In Green Valley (2008) the trees in the foreground are photographs (cut and pasted, I suspect), but then the winding, purple country road flattens in perspective, narrowing the depth of field into a dreamlike state — somewhere between theater design, graphic design, and Impressionism. In Summer Sky (2008) he accentuates the clouds in the sky, which gather in a vortex-like formation, as if the trees and sky are on the verge of being sucked into the horizon. Twenty-Five Big Trees Between Bridlington School and Morrison’s Supermarket on Bessingby Road, in the Semi-Egyptian Style, Monday 23 February/Thursday 26 February/Friday 27 February 2009 (2009) is almost entirely photographic, just stylistic, squiggly Hockney marks over the foreground footpath and sky. I also suspect an element of manipulation in the trees; perhaps they’ve been cut and pasted from elsewhere (I am curious to make a visit to Bessingby Road to see for myself).

The portraits also employ photographs. At a glance, there is little difference between these prints and Hockney’s oil-on-canvas portraits of his family, friends, and colleagues. Upon closer inspection, however, the portraits reveal a slippery finish that sets them apart from paintings. But, nevertheless, he takes his painting technique directly to the graphics tablet and Photoshop software, and the prints — in editions of between 7 and 25 — make up the next piece of his transcontinental community, woven together by his own visual diary. Photographs in the show’s catalogue give the viewer an understanding of the process: there is an image of Hockney in his studio with the subject, a man from Lisbon, sitting for him. Instead of an easel, Hockey is in front of his Mac computers and a graphics tablet; in lieu of paintbrushes he holds a stylus. Yet again, his visual match between reality and nonreality is successful.

"David Hockney" originally appeared in the September 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' September 2009 Table of Contents.