Culture

An exhibition in Brussels traces Hockney's artistic production

Brussels (Belgium), Oct 8 (EFE) .- (Camera: Leo Rodríguez) Touring the more than six decades of artistic production of the British painter and photographer David Hockney is the invitation of an exhibition that opens this Friday in Brussels to show the vital and professional career of one of the last great figures with life of Pop Art.FROM HOCKNEY'S EXHIBITION IN BRUSSELSSOUNDBITES FROM CURATOR HELEN LITTLE1. "Hockney is well known for changing the style and direction of his work over time. And one of the wonderful things that this exhibition offers is the opportunity to see again some of these characteristic moments of his career, decade by decade, where you can see the many twists that his work takes. This will take us from some of his early paintings, which combine an abstract language with a kind of emerging representations of bodies and a figuration, because he always felt that it was very important for him to make an art that was not abstract, but had a distinctly human aspect. Visitors will be able to see the incredible work he made in Los Angeles in the sixties. And Hockney, of course, is synonymous with Los Angeles and California and its famous paintings of pools and sprinklers and modernist houses and their fascination with representing water and highly reflective surfaces."2. "He rediscovered Picasso and felt strongly Picasso's ideas around Cubism and the way Cubist paintings force the eye and brain to look at images in the same way we do in reality, which is that we don't see the world through a single perspective. We see that we look at a face or a scene and that our eye and brain are constantly moving around it. And he makes an incredible set of prints, really very colorful, beautiful prints that give us the impression that we're moving in and around the work." 3. "Having investigated these ideas around Cubism, Hockney begins to think more seriously about the relationship that art has with photography. And he believes, and still believes very, very passionately that we as human beings don't see the world as a camera sees it. We are not locked in this moment frozen in time. And so, when he starts painting the landscape again, he's very committed to painting out on the plane with an enormous amount of feeling and expression." 4. "He was one of the first painters to use analogy to create art. Hockney has become synonymous with iPhone and iPad technology, which he's using to fantastic effect right now. And as you will see in the exhibition here. But its relationship with new technologies didn't just emerge with the launch of Apple's iPhone. His commitment to new technologies goes back decades before and I guess in the 80s he was one of the first artists to start using drawing technology in the first computers. He was fascinated and was invited to create images using that technology."5. "All these things come together in the final work of the first half of the exhibition, which is an extraordinary seven-meter-long panorama, which is a photograph of Hockney standing in his studio in the hills of Hollywood, California, surrounded by old and new paintings scattered around the studio. And when visitors come across this work, they think it's a fairly conventional-looking photograph. But, in reality, it has been built from more than 3,000 individual digital photographs that have come together to form an incredible composite image in which things are really in many different perspectives. And I think it's an extraordinary statement from the artist to say, 'This is me, this is my studio, this is where I work, and this is where I make my own rules for my art.'"