David Hockney returns to the Walker Art Center
This weekend, David Hockney returns to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Not in person, but through an exhibit of paintings and prints, many of which are in the museum's collection. The show includes much more than pictures of swimming pools by the prolific artist.
But let's talk about the pools, shall we? To many they are quintessential David Hockney: deceptively simple images of deep blue water under a bright sky. Sometimes they include a diving board and occasionally a person, or evidence someone has just left.
“Maybe the swimming pool is… a place of just kind of letting go. Just sort of forgetting the world for a while and having this moment of pure pleasure,” said Siri Engberg, who curated the new show, entitled “David Hockney: People Places & Things.”
She says the pool pictures demonstrate Hockney's attention to detail.
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“He actually stood around swimming pools and took photos of the water using a Polaroid,” Engberg said. “So he could really study the way the light hit the water and the interplay between lights and darks. Because he was creating these, you know, using just different colors."
This is an exhibition designed to show Hockney's versatility.
There are more than 100 pieces, which Engberg says is only about half of the Hockney artworks the Walker owns.
There's early work from just after the young Hockney arrived in New York from Britain in the 1960s. There is also very recent work, and many examples of how the artist has returned to and re-examined the same subjects in new ways.
"I just have incredible respect for the way he's able to almost effortlessly toggle between different styles and media, but throughout it still feels like it's a David Hockney," Engberg said.
There is a whole wall of images of his friend Celia Birtwell, ranging from quick sketches and careful studies to Picasso-like portraits. There is a room dominated by a theater set Hockney created for a Walker show in the early 1980s called "Hockney Paints the Stage." He spent weeks here working on it in one of the Walker galleries. It's complete with backdrops, and representations of actors performing.
"But as we walk up to it, we start to see that it actually is a painting. And each one of these figures that we're looking at, you know, standing on the quote-unquote stage is made up of tiny canvases stacked one on top of the other."
Hockney’s color palette of bright blues, yellows and red makes the set immediately recognizable as his work.
The exhibit also has examples of Hockney's interest in technology. Engberg says one piece in the show resulted from the time another arts institution was having problems convincing people to lend some of his works for an exhibit
"And so he said, ‘Fine, I'm just going to fax my entire contribution to the exhibition.’ And so what happened was that he would send his imagery, fax by fax or sheet by sheet, and then on the other end, they had to tile all these together to form these very large scale images."
The example in the show covers a side wall in the gallery. Nearby hang huge ethereal images of a wood in East Yorkshire in England which Hockney did on an iPad in 2011. Engberg says he then took advantage of the ability to make huge high-quality prints. She describes them as “ambitiously scaled.” Each one is over four feet tall and almost three and a half feet wide.
"It almost feels like we could step into the picture,” she said. “And I think he chose that scale fairly deliberately so that they could almost have that painting-like feel to them.”
For all the variety in the show each piece is recognizable as a Hockney. It's partly that use of color, though Engberg says there may be something more.
"It feels familiar to us, because it's familiar to him. And we start to see… these subjects come back in the work again and again. But it… always feels fresh that that is another thing that I really appreciate," she said.
After working on the show Engberg says she's developed an even greater respect for David Hockney and his work. And as a Minnesotan entering winter, she also really appreciates the swimming pools.