Hockney’s Big High-Tech Art Opens Eyes From Yosemite to Yorkshire: Review
The Royal Academy of Arts in London has never been host to an exhibition quite like David Hockney’s “A Bigger Picture.”
The academy has a history dating to 1768. The one-man show, which runs from Jan. 21 to April 9, is a tour de force. It consists almost entirely of new work, using both low-tech media such as painting and the latest high-tech tools.
Hockney approaches the time-honored subject of nature in a fresh, contemporary way. The result is spectacular.
You might ask, what’s the point of a bigger picture? Hockney means the phrase in two ways. The first is paradoxical: the larger the image, the closer to it the viewer feels. While an ordinary-sized canvas is like a window on the world, a huge one envelops you. Abstract painters such as Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock worked on a large scale for this reason.
Hockney does the same, depicting what he likes to call “the visible world.” In the exhibition, there are wall-sized paintings of corners of Yorkshire countryside near his current base of operations in the seaside town of Bridlington. The subjects are woodland and undergrowth. Looking at them, you almost feel the leaves brush your face.
That is one kind of big picture. The other is more hi-tech. Hockney has long argued that the photograph, seen through a single lens, constricts our sense of the world. After all, we have two eyes -- connected, as Hockney puts it, “to the mind.” We move around a world we can touch and feel. In lots of ways, our experience isn’t like the normal camera view.
Multiple Cameras
To address the problem, Hockney has come up with a new kind of picture created by multiple, high-definition cameras set at slightly different angles. The result is a moving photo-collage: a bigger picture because it sees more, from varying points of view.
Most of the films on show are landscapes, though the most recent is a dance spectacular, shot on 18 cameras in Hockney’s studio. It gives a wonderful festive finale to the exhibition, in which Hockney paints the stage in sumptuous color, and shoots the action like a combination of Pablo Picasso and Busby Berkeley.
The whole exhibition, as you walk through it, has a feeling of crescendo. After an initial section dealing with Hockney landscapes from early in his career, and including epic views of the Grand Canyon and Hollywood Hills, it mainly focuses on the Yorkshire terrain in which he has been working for the last few years.
Photo: "The Road across the Wolds" (1997) by David Hockney, in "David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture" at the Royal Academy. Photographer: Steve Oliver/Royal Academy via Bloomberg
More news
 |
The Leonardo exhibition at the National Gallery in London faces disruption by strikes action from this week.
17 January '12
www.guardian.co.uk
|
 |
A Vincent van Gogh landscape and other paintings from the collection of Elizabeth Taylor are up for auction in London next month.
17 January '12
www.artdaily.org
|
 |
Major artists and new talent on show from 18 - 22 January 2012.
17 January '12
www.telegraph.co.uk
|
 |
The dates for the trio of major London summer fairs have now been released.
16 January '12
www.antiquestradegazette.com
|
 |
Eager art-lovers trying to secure tickets for the Royal Academy's new David Hockney exhibition have overwhelmed the ticketing website and phoneline.
16 January '12
www.telegraph.co.uk
|
 |
A self-described amateur art dealer pleaded guilty Thursday to forging appraisal documents before selling several prints purportedly by famed British artist Damien Hirst that were in fact fakes.
16 January '12
online.wsj.com
|
 |
David Hockney has rebuffed claims that he is Britain's greatest living artist, calling the description "newspaper stuff".
16 January '12
www.bbc.co.uk
|
 |
Serious buyers, curatorial attendance and museum sales have cemented Art Antiques London into the dynamic landscape of London’s cultural life and the international fair market.
15 January '12
www.artdaily.org
|
 |
Research recently revealed that the Rijksmuseum’s monumental bronze statue of Shiva was cast in solid bronze.
14 January '12
www.artdaily.org
|
 |
The Musée d'Orsay is planning an upcoming show on "Degas and the Nude" for March, but they didn't expect half-nude models to produce their own exhibition in the Impressionist galleries one day last month.
14 January '12
artinfo.com
|
 |
Pablo Picasso has been dethroned. The world auction market’s top earner in recent years must yield to Chinese artist Zhang Daqian (1899-1983), according to a report from French research company Artprice.
12 January '12
www.bloomberg.com
|
 |
The house where Van Gogh lodged in the Borinage, where he was an evangelist among the coalminers, is falling down.
12 January '12
www.theartnewspaper.com
|
 |
An exhibition, The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011, is currently being mounted simultaneously at 11 Gagosian Galleries around the world, including London, New York, Paris and Hong Kong.
12 January '12
www.telegraph.co.uk
|
 |
Attendance at the Museum of Modern Art dropped 11 percent last season to 2.8 million, as the previous year’s marathon motionlessness of Marina Abramovic and designs from movie director Tim Burton proved to be hard acts to follow.
12 January '12
www.bloomberg.com
|
 |
A spectacular bronze figure of the Farnese Bull (The Punishment of Dirce) is one of the major pieces of sculpture to be shown by Tomasso Brothers Fine Art at TEFAF Maastricht at the Maastricht Exhibition and Congress Centre (MECC) from 16 to 25 March 2012.
12 January '12
www.artdaily.org
|
 |
Gagosian Gallery presents “The Complete Spot Paintings 1986–2011” by Damien Hirst. The exhibition will take place at once across all of Gagosian Gallery’s eleven locations in New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, Rome, Athens, Geneva, and Hong Kong, opening worldwide on January 12, 2012.
12 January '12
|
 |
Art Amsterdam will be undergoing a metamorphosis. The art fair will be more exclusive and compact. Art Amsterdam will be held from 20 - 23 September 2012. The exact location of the event will be announced shortly.
12 January '12
|
 |
The Andy Warhol Foundation was accused in a lawsuit by The Velvet Underground of infringing the trademark for the banana design on the cover of the rock group’s first album in 1967.
12 January '12
www.bloomberg.com
|
