The National Portrait Gallery’s autumn programme will see the return of the five-star exhibition, David Hockney: Drawing from Life, which was staged for just 20 days before the Gallery’s closure due to Covid in March 2020.
The exhibition explores the artist’s work over the last six decades through his intimate portraits of five sitters: his mother, Celia Birtwell, Gregory Evans, Maurice Payne and the artist himself. His familiarity with the sitters enables him to work with a range of mediums and styles, from pencil, pen and ink and crayon, to photographic collage and the iPad. The 2023 exhibition will also debut a selection of over thirty new portraits. Painted from life they depict friends and visitors to the artist’s Normandy studio between 2021 and 2022.
Contemporary
David Hockney is considered one of the most celebrated British contemporary artists. Hockney studied at the Bradford School of Art (1953-7) and the Royal College of Art (1959-62) with R.B. Kitaj, Allen Jones and Derek Boshier. Graduating with a gold medal, he became a leading figure in Pop Art. His work embraces drawing, painting, printmaking, photography and stage design. His first retrospective was at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1970. In 1999 he began hundreds of portraits using camera lucida, on which he published research. In recent years, Hockney has divided his time between Los Angeles and London, and created work using the Brushes iPad app. Exhibitions of his portraits include David Hockney Portraits (National Portrait Gallery, 2006-7) and 82 Portraits and 1 Still-life (RA, 2016).
David Hockney: Drawing from Life, explored Hockney as a draughtsman from the 1950s to the present by focusing on depictions of himself and a small group of sitters close to him: his muse, Celia Birtwell; his mother, Laura Hockney; and friends, the curator, Gregory Evans, and master printer, Maurice Payne.
Trajectory
Featuring around 150 works from public and private collections across the world, as well as from the David Hockney Foundation and the artist, the exhibition traced the trajectory of his practice by revisiting these five subjects over a period of six decades. Highlights included a series of new portraits; coloured pencil drawings created in Paris in the early 1970s; composite Polaroid portraits from the 1980s; and a selection of drawings from an intense period of self-scrutiny during the 1980s when the artist created a self-portrait every day over a period of two months.
The exhibition opened 27th February 2020 until the Gallery’s Covid-19 related closure on 17th March.
A catalogue for the exhibition explores Hockney as a draughtsman from the 1950s to now, with a focus on himself, his family and friends. From Ingres to the iPad – this book demonstrates the artist’s ingenuity in portrait drawing with reference to both tradition and technology.
www.npg.org.uk
See also: Chris Levine’s Final Tribute to Queen Elizabeth II
