David Hockney: 'Photographies 1968 - 1997'

Over the years David Hockney has built up a collection of some 30,000 photographs. Few have ever been put on public view.

These images constitute a kind of private diary kept by the painter since 1961. They are a record of the life of an artist so effectively embodied by David Hockney. Many of the photographs record trips, visits and details of his extraordinary professional activity; others are pictures of friends and familiar objects. All remain faithful to his immediate sense of painterly composition.

David Hockney has emphasized how photography has always been a matter of impulse for him. Something spotted during a trip, the face of a visitor or an aspect of work in progress can often prompt him to reach for his camera. Only when this overpowering need to record what he sees has been fulfilled does he set his camera down again.

Hockney often stages his photos, and the idea often precedes the image in his photographic work. For this indefatigable maker of drawings and paintings, reality is also a mental construct. It is easy to see how some of these countless photographs of tiny details are part of a mental process which led to the development of the great pictorial compositions for which he is famous, while others gave rise to subtle photo collages.

But the best illustrations of the complex relationship between photography and painting in Hockneys work are his large photographic collages. These 'drawings with a camera' lend another, more subjective dimension to photography. They transcend photography because they are no longer just photos but ideas about seeing, in which the very act of perception is represented on a flat surface.

This reflexion on the idea of perception is at the heart of Hockneys painterly approach to photography and of his desire to roll back the frontiers of the photographic medium. Hockneys exploration of the extreme boundaries of certain techniques can be seen in his use of photocopiers, fax machines and the latest digitalized printing techniques.

Whether in composing large collages (1988), in taking pictures of visitors to his studio (Visitors, 1990-1991) or in creating fluid abstract scenes (Snails Spaces, 1995-1996), photography is just one technique among many for an artist whose talent revolutionizes our way of seeing.

Exhibition curated by: Alain Sayag, Curator of the Musée national dart moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou.


Other events in Paris:

From 27 Jan to 26 April 1999
Centre Georges Pompidou: David Hockney Espace/Paysage

From 10 February to 3 May 1999
Musée Picasso: David Hockney - Dialogue avec Picasso


Biographical notes
 

9 July 1937	David Hockney born in Bradford, England
1953-1957	Studied at the Bradford School of Art.
1959-1962	Studied at the Royal College of Art, along with R.B. Kitaj et Allen Jones.
1963	First one-man exhibition at the Kasmin Gallery (London).
1964	Moved to Los Angeles; first Swimming Pools.
1969	Exhibition at the White Chapel Gallery (London).
1974	Retrospective at the Musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris.
1975	Designed costumes and sets for The Rakes Progress (Stravinsky) for the Glyndebourne festival.
1976	Presentation of 20 photographs in a book by Illeana Sonnabend. David Hockney began taking photographs regularly in 1961 and has amassed some 30.000 photographs in 150 large-format albums.
1978	Made his first Paper Pools and the costumes and sets for Mozarts The Magic Flute.
1981	Visited China with Stephen Spender.
1982	Exhibition of photographic work at the Centre Georges Pompidou: first Polaroid collages.
1983	Travelling exhibition of photographs organized by the Arts Council of Great Britain
Déc 1985	Special issue of Vogue featuring photography; exhibition at the Galerie Claude Bernard, Paris.
1986	Pearblossom Highway, the last large photographic collage. Exhibition of photo-collage at the I.C.P. in New York.
1987	Costumes and sets for Wagners Tristan and Isolde.
1988	Publication of Hockney on Photography, conversations with Paul Joyce. Retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of New York and at the TateGallery in London. Began using fax machines to make large collages from a distance.
1990-1991	Visitors, a series of photomontages made into digitalized images and printed on a colour laser printer.
1993	Published Thats The Way I See It.
1995	Retrospective of drawings at the Royal Academy (London). Began Snails Space, combining photography and painting.
1997	Photowork at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne.