David Hockney's works return to Hawaii with the Honolulu Museum of Art's new expansive exhibition of the artist's prints, spanning five decades of his career. The show comprises over 100 pieces that follow Hockney's artistic voyage from the '50s up to recent years.
Co-curator Katherine Love and museum director Catherine Whitney told The Guardian that they were "drawn to different periods and media" in Hockney's portfolio, from his analog works of photo collages to his more digital-leaning works he created using iPad, iPhones, and the like.
The HoMA show, which started its run last Nov. 17 and is expected to last until March 10, is a multi-sectioned exhibition built around the themes of "dualities" of Hockney's oeuvre.
David Hockney's Play on Opposites
"David Hockney: Perspective Should Be Reversed, Prints from the Collections of Jordan D Schnitzer and His Family Foundation" has a total of six sections which include Interiors and Exteriors; Tradition and Innovation; Ordinary Objects and Extraordinary Renderings; On Stage and Page; and Portraits of Self and Others.
"There are just so many contrasting binaries in the work throughout his career. He has an incredible way of contrasting opposites in a celebratory way," said Whitney.
The show itself teeters back and forth between these binary concepts that Hockney depicted center-stage throughout his entire pursuit of Western art. This can be seen in his earlier works that utilized Polaroid snapshots in humongous collages where Hockney embeds various perspectives of realities within.
According to co-curator Whitney, this concept is also present in Hockney's "experimentation" with new technology and his "awareness" of the past, describing the artist as someone who's "always interested in learning more about history" while also "sort of always moving beyond."
The Influence of Picasso on David Hockney
The exhibition's headlining piece and namesake painting, "Perspective Should be Reversed," is conceptually stocky and is riddled with meta-referencing depictions of characters that are ever-present in Hockney's works.
One reference in particular is Hockney's inclusion of TJ Clark's "Picasso and Truth" which portrays the artist's inclinations with the Spanish cubism legend's artistry. Museum director Love shared that Hockney had always been engrossed with Picasso and the Spaniard's movement away from conventionalism.
In the same way that cubism is a distortion of how people perceive reality, Hockney was also interested in that meta-perspective of the world. Hockney explored this idea further by bringing cubism into photography in his later works in the 2010s, one of which is his pioneering of the iconic Polaroid collages.
"One of the issues Hockney has with traditional photography is that it's from a static viewpoint. But humans experience looking around the world; we can move our eyes," shared Love, before adding that it's this "constant play with reality" that elevated and made Hockney's work interesting.
