Metro Detroiters: If you haven’t visited Grand Rapids in a while, you should soon.
The Grand Rapids Art Museum is hosting a massive exhibition of prints by David Hockney, a British fine artist known for his playful, vibrant images across multiple mediums, from paintings to drawings and more.
Taking up two floors of the GRAM and featuring some 170 prints, David Hockney: Perspective Should Be Reversed is billed as the largest-ever retrospective of the artist. The show opened on May 31.
It comes to Grand Rapids courtesy of Jordan D. Schnitzer, a Portland, Oregon businessman and philanthropist known as one of the top collectors of art prints in North America, and his Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation.
“He probably is the foremost artist today in the world,” says Schnitzer, who considers Hockney a friend. That’s due to Hockney’s longevity — at 88, he’s still creating to this day — as well as what Schnitzer believes is a natural sense of aesthetics.
“Artists have always been chronicles of our time,” Schnitzer says, adding, “their job is either to do very lovely things that just take our breath away, or things that grab us and make us think. Now David Hockney, he does both.”
The name of the exhibition — Perspective Should Be Reversed — is a reference not only to Hockney’s penchant for eschewing formal techniques by incorporating multiple angles or vanishing points into his portraits and landscapes, but also to his open mind about art and technology. No purist, Hockney eagerly experimented with new methods and mediums through the decades of his career, including then-new Xerox copy machines and most recently the iPad.
“This exhibition of 175 works from our collection really is a preview of his life,” Schnitzer says.
Born in 1937 in Bradford, England, Hockney’s artistic studies took him to London, and he eventually found his way to sunny Los Angeles, where he was able to fully embrace his sexuality. The imagery he is perhaps best known for is sunny landscapes of California pools — his 1972 painting “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” once sold for $90.3 million, at that time the highest price ever paid at auction for a painting by a living artist, and was even spoofed in the cartoon BoJack Horseman — as well as pastoral views of his native English countryside.
“If you look at this work, my gosh, you can see the detail,” Schnitzer says of a large painting of Yosemite National Park. “It’s almost as if you’re walking along, seeing El Capitan right behind you.”
The exhibition is divided into five themes: “Interiors and Exteriors,” “Portraits of Self and Others,” “Ordinary Objects and Extraordinary Renderings,” “Tradition and Innovation,” and “On Stage and Page.”
“I loved the freedom to be able to work that way because I think it gives you more of a sense that he is changing and evolving and his techniques are changing and evolving,” says Jennifer Wcisel, GRAM’s Dean and Helga Toriello Curator of Collections and Exhibitions. “He’s still grappling with many of the same themes and ideas throughout the six decades that he has been working.”
Hockney’s sense of play extended not just to the process of image-making itself — his brushstrokes and linework can have an almost naive, childlike quality — but also to the presentation of the work. An edition of prints made using Xerox copies is presented in identical frames; Hockney found an old frame he liked and commissioned a frame shop to replicate it for each edition.
Other images include a montage of Polaroid photographs, and of course his work using Apple’s iPad digital tablet.
One work, titled “10th – 22nd June 2021, Water Lillies in the Pond with Pots of Flowers,” is made up of high-quality prints reproduced from six digital paintings created with an iPad, a technique Hockney came to embrace in his old age. Regardless of the method, Hockney’s artistic qualities shine through.
“You look at this, you can actually, I think, hear the raindrops dropping in the pond,” Schnitzer says of the prints. “You can see the splashes. You can see the water waves. And you can sort of smell the fresh air of the farm.”
“He is very open to innovation and not afraid of new technology,” Wcisel says, adding, “He’s always been drawing, drawing, drawing every day. When the iPad came out in 2010, he immediately latched onto it because it was backlit. He could draw in bed, he could draw outside by light, he could draw at night time, and he loved that flexibility that the iPad gave him.”
Hockney even helped develop a custom iPad app called “Hockney Brushes,” a digital painting app tailored to his specifications.
But as much as he looked to the future, Hockney was rooted in tradition. Especially influential to his art was Pablo Picasso and the Cubist art movement.
“Art history is incredibly important to him,” Wcisel says.
One portrait depicts Gregory Evans, a longtime friend and former romantic partner of Hockney’s. “[It was] at a time when their romantic relationship had fallen apart, and they were sort of trying to find their way to just a friendship at that point,” Wcisel says. “It’s interesting that the bottom half seems very formal, whereas in the top half, you start to see maybe a little fidgeting, [Evans is] touching his head. You’ve got a cigarette there, too, and he’s a little concerned, or perturbed.”
In one drawing, Hockney even depicted himself as a nude model sitting across from his idol Picasso.
The Grand Rapids Museum of Art is the third venue to host the exhibition, following stops in Honolulu, Hawaii, and Palm Springs, California. It runs at the GRAM through Nov 2.
“The purpose of our education program was to take the big star names today and get them to communities that are a little less served, than if you’re in New York or Chicago or L.A.,” Schnitzer says. “So we’re glad that this exhibition is here.”
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