David Hockney: Works from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation
Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR - To July 26
The largest North American survey of Hockney’s work ever assembled is making quite a splash in Portland. Inside the newly renovated Portland Art Museum, the two-floor show traces the full arc of a restlessly inventive mind. It features more than 200 pieces spanning six decades, including prints, collages, video, photographic works, and drawings made on an iPad.
Hockney was known as “the Boy from Bradford” at the Royal College of Art in Swinging London, where he evolved from abstraction to Pop Art. The provincial “Boy” learned he was a far more talented draftsman than his privileged peers. He discovered the even more swinging Los Angeles in 1964. He shuttled to and from LA until 1977, when he settled there, but did have periods living back in Yorkshire and Normandy, France, where he inhaled the landscape and foliage and
put them through his art historical blender.
Hockney’s iconic subjects are all here: California swimming pools shimmering in saturated color, the vast sweep of Yosemite, English countryside bursting into bloom, and frank portrayals of friends, family and queer intimacy. The focus
is on how Hockney sees and how that vision has evolved with technology. From Xerox prints to Polaroids to iPad and iPhone sketches, he embraces each new tool as an extension of his eye.
Hockney loved to investigate tools, such as the camera obscura (for drawing perspective) and media such as Chinese
scrolls and screens, but he was also interested in how technology helps people communicate. During the isolation of COVID-19, he made iPad paintings of bunches of flowers to send to friends, and a huge wall of these prints stands as a monument to those deadly times.
His 2014 photographic series exploring “reversed perspective,” where the foreground commands attention rather than a distant vanishing point, shows men in rooms with oddly shaped tables and wall hangings, where multiple angles collapse into a single image. It’s one of his many takes on Cubism and his hero Picasso. Now age 88, Hockney is still prolific, and this show feels hot with creativity. Organized by Catherine Whitney, Honolulu Museum of Art.
