David Hockney
A Bigger Picture
May 15–September 30, 2012
Guggenheim Bilbao
Avenida Abandoibarra, 2
48001 Bilbao, Spain
Curated by Edith Devaney, Curator of Contemporary Projects at the Royal Academy of Arts, London; Marco Livingstone, independent curator.
Organized by the Royal Academy of Arts in collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, David Hockney: A Bigger Picture is the first major exhibition held in Spain to celebrate the crucial role landscape plays in the career of this artist, considered the most important living British painter.
Bright landscapes inspired by his native county of Yorkshire form the core of this exhibition which, with Iberdrola’s sponsorship, brings together on the Museum’s second floor nearly 190 works—oil paintings, charcoals, iPad drawings, sketchbooks, and digital videos—most of which have been created in the past eight years. This exhibition offers a unique vision into Hockney’s creative world and demonstrates his enormous capacity to represent nature using different techniques, as well as revealing his attachment to the landscape of his youth.
The exhibition also illustrates the extent to which the depiction of the natural environment has been present throughout the artist’s career, even when other subjects were the focus of his output. A selection of works from 1956—during his student days in Bradford—until 1998 contextualizes Hockney’s later landscapes and reveals his early preoccupation with the representation of space and his use of color and manipulation of perspective to reflect the natural world.
Sponsored by Iberdrola.
*Image above:
David Hockney, The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty eleven). Oil on 32 canvases. 365.8 x 975.4 cm (each 91.4 x 121.9 cm); one of a 52-part work. Courtesy of the artist. Copyright David Hockney. Photo: Jonathan Wilkinson.
