Installation photograph, “David Hockney: Painting and Photography”.
David Hockney: Painting and Photography, presently showing at the esteemed L.A. Louver in Venice, CA., reveals the artist’s continuous quest for innovation, whether via painting or photographic collage. The exhibition is a collection of works that exude Hockney’s signature pop sensibilities while seriously pushing the limits of the viewer’s perception.
“In the photographs, the composition is done using hundreds of photographs, like a photo collage, stitched together using Photoshop. Each individual or object is photographed separately; sometimes multiple photographs, and these are each placed within the frame of the room separately,” explains gallery director Kimberly Davis. “Each photo has it’s own perspective, so the view is faced with images of multiple perspectives in each of the photographic works.”
David Hockney, “Card Players #1”, 2014, Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 72 in.
The paintings and photographic drawings are at first jarring and then, upon further consideration (as with Cubism), gains special meaning. The same individuals will appear standing in one painting or photographic rendering, and then sitting in another area of a painting/photographic rendering,(and so on), so that collectively, the works explore different angles of observation. Using both repetition and nuanced changes in perspective, the viewer is challenged to notice familiar characters and objects “moving” throughout the space. These “doubles” simultaneously feel familiar and very different.
David Hockney, “Card Players #2”, 2014, Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 72 in.
“The placement, or installation of the paintings, was originally designed around the catalogue layout,” says Davis. “However, in our gallery space, it made more sense to organize the paintings and photos by ideas. So there is one wall of works related to Hockney’s examination and interpretation of Cézanne’s ‘Card Players’ paintings…In this grouping he used both the link of Cézanne’s ideas of time and space with his own, with chemical photography changing into digital photography, and the lines between painting and photography blurring even further.”
Walking through the gallery, the viewer is forced, via the paintings’ and photographs’ multiple vanishing points, to constantly reassess what in fact is being observed. The feeling of motion, of unexpected appearances and disappearances, of undulating colors and shadows, wonderfully forces us to question where the truth and beauty of any given situation or environ lies.
Installation photograph, “David Hockney: Painting and Photography”.
