Latest news with #Hockney
Spectator
31-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
A plea for painting: David Hockney 25, at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, reviewed
The exploding sails of Frank Gehry's Louis Vuitton building in Paris are currently packed with the exhilarating visual explorations of the octogenarian artist David Hockney. The exhibition begins with a roomful of the paintings that made Hockney famous in the 1960s: his graffiti-style canvases, packed with secret codes and illicit kisses. The next gallery is full of the very different paintings that made him even more famous: swimming pools in sunshine and boys sprawled on beds. Gays straight on, square to the picture frame – images, pure and simple; no hidden hints, no text. This gallery also contains a couple of the portraits that further spread his fame. Sadly, none of the drawings for these are included. In his painting of Christopher Isherwood, his bushy eyebrows curtain his eyes, but in the drawing, you see one pupil glaring out. The intensity of the writer's intelligence is lost in the softer brushwork, but caught in Hockney's darting, edgy line. Hockney is a superb draughtsman, and drawing is something he does all the time, but you'd barely know it from this exhibition. The occasional portrait sketch is included, and these are among the most moving images in the show, above all the drawing of his sister Margaret in 2013. The main part of the exhibition is, nevertheless, an extraordinary visual feast: vast landscapes, panoramas and flowers in acrylic. And between the gallery displays, there are films and records of other projects – his opera sets and obsession with the history of perspective. One aspect of his work, apart from drawing, is however unfortunately nearly absent: photography. Only one is included, at the very end: 'Pearblossom Highway' (1986), a fascinating assembly of over 800 snaps of everything he could see from the litter at his feet to the mountains in the distance. The technique he then developed of collaging multiple images to create a whole scene explains why so many of his wall-size paintings are made up of mosaics of smaller eyefuls. Photography is a key to understanding Hockney's art. It was his first interest in visual mechanisation, which flowered later with his work with iPads. I was once in his studio in 1995 when he was making a print of a photo he'd just taken of a vase of sunflowers propped up next to a painting that he'd done of the same subject as a get-well card. The painting, due to a trick of perspective, looked as though it was standing in front of the photo, radiating brightly in real space. I said he should call the print 'Photography is dead. Long live painting.' He did. This whole exhibition can be seen, in a way, as a plea for painting, during an era when painting was being marginalised. But there is room for his iPad work too. The drawback here is that handcraft on the iPad is limited; lines drawn on it can express a kind of feeling I guess, but textures brushed in with a stylus usually look impersonal, manufactured. There's a room of these works near the end. My attention was held by one of a group of winter trees standing in a field of white tulips (one red). Their presence reminds us of the Hockney quote that's blazoned on the side of the building as we go in: 'Do remember they cannot cancel spring'. The work is called 'Small Trees' (2023). Then, in a tiny dark room at the very end, there are four paintings painted specially for this show. And words are back in them, too. In his painting 'After Blake' – hanging below the steps that repeatedly spell out the phrase: 'Less is known than people think' – red curtains part to tell us 'It's the now that is eternal'. He painted himself painting himself in the centre of 'Play Within a Play Within a Play and Me with a Cigarette' (2024-25), between some daffodils and the bare sprig of a tree. There are no words in this picture, except for those on his lapel badge which read 'End Bossiness Soon'. Hockney is again spelling out what he really thinks and feels, as he did when he started, in his shadowy, pleading, gay graffiti. In this self-portrait, his eyes, for the first time, are lowered. They seem to say: let me be myself, as I face death; the deeply moving closing of an extraordinarily creative life.
Times
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Belgian king: David Hockney inspired me to paint
It was a long way from the late-spring tunnels of Bridlington, but there was something about the luminous greens and long shadows of the landscape behind the king that told of who had a hand in it. King Philippe, the intensely private Belgian head of state, had agreed to be interviewed this week only after his children said he should answer questions from young people about what makes him tick. What emerged from his answers on YouTube was a portrait of an accomplished amateur artist who counted among his chief inspirations David Hockney, the painter often thought to be Britain's greatest living artist. Reclining in a chair in his palace, Philippe, 65, identified the landscape of his garden as a favourite, inspired by Hockney, 87.
Time Out
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
These are the best exhibitions to see in Paris right now
News Your ultimate guide to the must-see art shows and exhibitions in Time Out's recently-crowned best city for culture Craving a proper dose of art? No matter the season, Paris serves up a banquet of exhibitions so rich and varied it can be hard to know where to tuck in. But thankfully, you've got us on hand to help. We've roamed the city to handpick the crème de la crème of exhibitions on display right now – whether you're into painting, photography, contemporary art, sculpture, or design, there's something on this list for you. Here are the very best exhibitions on in Paris right now. Dans le Flou – Another Vision of Art from 1945 to Today Following their deep dive into the link between Impressionism and abstraction, the Orangerie is now exploring what happens when things get a little... blurry. Inspired by Monet's late masterpieces, the show journeys from the 1940s to today, demonstrating how artists have embraced visual ambiguity, abstraction, and indistinct forms to create emotion and tension. The exhibition opens with a quote from Grégoire Bouillier's novel The Orangerie Syndrome: 'In truth, we see nothing. Nothing precise. Nothing definite. One must constantly readjust one's sight.' And that's exactly what this show makes you do – look again, and again. Where? Musée de l'Orangerie When? Until August 18 2025 Matisse et Marguerite – A Father's Gaze We all know Matisse as a heavyweight of twentieth-century art, but how well do we know Marguerite? More than just a muse, she was an essential emotional and artistic presence in his life – and this beautifully curated exhibition finally gives her the spotlight. With over 100 works, including portraits, sketches, sculptures, and intimate archival materials, this show paints a vivid portrait of a deep and complex father-daughter bond. It's about love, creativity, and the quiet power of presence. Where? Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris When? Until August 24 2025 David Hockney 25 Let's be honest: David Hockney doesn't need much of an introduction, but even for superfans of this British icon, this exhibition is quite something. Not only is it the largest Hockney retrospective to date, with over 400 works spread across the entire Fondation Louis Vuitton, but the man himself was deeply involved in every aspect of its curation, from theme to layout. The epic, career-spanning exhibition journeys all the way from the 1960s to Hockney's latest digital experiments, so if you only go to one show this spring, make it this one. It's bold, brilliant, and very, very Hockney. Where? Fondation Louis Vuitton When? Until August 31 2025 The Paris of Agnès Varda You might know Agnès Varda as a Nouvelle Vague pioneer, filmmaker, feminist icon, and general queen of cool. But before the camera rolled, she was behind another kind of lens – as a professional photographer, trained and certified, with a practice that started even before her first films. This exhibition explores the Paris captured by Varda's camera from the 1950s onward: her neighbours, her streets, her studio. It's a tender and powerful tribute to a city she loved. Where? When? Until August 24 2025 The Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville is a career-defining image, but Robert Doisneau was so much more than one iconic snap, and that's exactly what this rich, personal exhibition proves. Curated in part by his daughters Francine Deroudille and Annette Doisneau, the show reveals a man driven not just by aesthetics, but by empathy. It draws from a staggering archive of over 450,000 negatives, not just showing us Doisneau's images but sharing the way he saw people. Expect warmth, wit, and moments of unfiltered humanity. Where? Musée Maillol When? Until October 12 2025 Azzedine Alaïa, Thierry Mugler Before designer collabs were all over Instagram, they were rare, risky, and revolutionary. Case in point: Azzedine Alaïa quietly created pieces for Thierry Mugler in the late 1970s, and this show traces their creative crossover, starting with the unforgettable tuxedo designs from Mugler's 1979-80 collection. It's a love letter to craftsmanship, mentorship, and the kind of fashion storytelling that shaped an era. Tucked inside the Fondation Alaïa, this show is a must for couture lovers and fashion nerds alike. Where? Fondation Azzedine Alaïa When? Until June 29 2025 WAX Sure, wax fabrics are striking and vibrant — but they're also deeply political. This thoughtful, two-level exhibition dives into the colonial, cultural, and economic history behind one of Africa's most iconic textiles. All part of the museum's 'Migrations' season, WAX uncovers how this cloth became a symbol of identity and resistance across continents, featuring contemporary works, fashion, and archival material. It's a reminder that behind every pattern is a story worth telling. When? Until September 7 2025 Along the gold thread – Dressing from the Orient to the Rising Sun Forget trendy, bulky chains – gold has been a fashion staple since the dawn of civilisation, and this dazzling exhibition explores humanity's obsession with golden garments, all the way from ancient Mesopotamia to Japan's Edo period. Over-the-top? Absolutely. But it's also deeply researched and incredibly, well, rich. Expect robes woven with gold threads, religious vestments, ceremonial wear, and pieces that truly shimmer with spiritual – and literal – weight. Where? Musée du Quai Branly When? Until July 6 2025 Expo Disco: I'm Coming Out The idea? Disco meets installation art. The execution? A bit hazy, but it's fun. Visitors are welcomed by a molecule of ether shaped like a disco ball, courtesy of Jeanne Susplugas, and while the conceptual threat of the exhibition is a little hard to follow, there's glitter, music, and the undeniably dazzling energy of disco liberation. Where? La Villette When? Until August 17 2025 Fashion takes the spotlight in the Louvre's first-ever major clothing exhibition. Covering nearly 9,000 square meters, Louvre Couture places over 100 looks from 45 designers (think Chanel, Gaultier, Marine Serre) in dialogue with the museum's most historic pieces. The result? Sometimes breathtaking, sometimes baffling. But it's an ambitious swing – and one that puts fashion back in its rightful place: at the heart of art history.
Los Angeles Times
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
My father photographed David Hockney and his mother in the ‘80s. It's an image I haven't stopped thinking about
I ask my students: What would an essay be like if it were structured like a grid? What would it be like to structure it as a lopsided, organic shape? I am teaching a class called 'On Collage.' Every time I do, we make a new center of gravity for the course together. One or two students will explain collage each week, introducing a collage or an artist, but first I offer my own version: a slideshow I have no notes for. Depending on the way I've prepared for class that week, I'll compose a narrative about the slides in a way that articulates what collage might offer us. The slideshow begins with a black-and-white photograph of a man with light hair, a cap and glasses standing behind a tall rattan chair where an older woman is seated. She smiles broadly, her chest puffed out like a robin in early spring. His face is a bit more fluid, untraceable, tucked into itself, echoed by the arm he holds across his body, drawing his striped tie askew. His glasses hold a reflection that must include the photographer, but when I zoom in, the shadow and light become a bunch of shapes, and I get distracted by an unsettling look in the man's eyes, which have an air of surprise or warning. His ears are quotation marks. His mouth is as close as a mouth can come to a sideways question mark, punctuated by a cautious smile line. I've watched enough documentaries to know that this is as likely a response to the photographer as it is to the woman whose shoulder he is grasping with his other hand. David Hockney and his mother. In the 1980s, my father, Lester Sloan, was a photojournalist for Newsweek magazine assigned to photograph Hockney for a story about artists designing posters for the 1984 Olympics. Hockney made a poster of a swimmer underwater, captured through 12 Polaroid photographs arranged in a grid. Swimming figures ripple through Hockney's early paintings as if swimming from one frame to another. When I read from an essay that I wrote on Hockney's swimming pools once, two scholars wondered aloud about John Cheever's 'The Swimmer,' and I am often haunted by this moment, as if I should have known better than to write about swimming pools without reading more things great men had said about them. But what I notice now, looking literally over my shoulder as if I'll see the memory, is that the essay as a genre favors the unique thread of one person's associations. As Hockney puts it, 'We always see with memory. Seeing each person's memory is a bit different. We can't be looking at the same things, can we?' Art offers or asks us to sketch a thing that has moved through us too quickly to capture it completely. It should throw a shadow of chemical memory across our faces like the smell of chlorine. On the day he took this photograph, my father went to Hockney's California home, tucked into the Hollywood Hills. The artist wanted to show him the Polaroid collages — what he coined 'joiners' — he had begun to make. My father has recalled Hockney's sense of wonder at this new approach to artmaking so many times over the course of my life that I can see it — the sun-lit table on which Hockney laid those pieces. Hockney has said that he was so distracted by the joiners that he couldn't sleep at night. 'I used to get up in the middle of the night and sit and look at them to find out what I was doing,' he told Paul Joyce. He bought thousands of dollars' worth of film and roamed his own house in search of compositions. 'Time was appearing in the picture. And because of it, space, a bigger illusion of space.' Some of the photographs are arranged in a grid, though the dissonance between them — one square depicting a table from inches away, another from across the room — creates an ethereality, a wind within the frame. Some of the photographs are arranged freely, as if to follow the line of sight as it traces figures in a space — wind-scattered. Overlapping, stuttering, arcing upward. When I first asked my father about this day, he recalled the degree to which Hockney oriented toward his mother when he came to take this portrait. The painter was orbiting her, asking her thoughts on the conversation, nodding toward her with his body. At this point in the slide show, I show some frames from the film 'Blow-Up,' wherein a London photographer snaps some pictures of a couple kissing in the park. As he develops the film later, he tries to zoom in more and more on a particular frame. He realizes that there is a man with a gun in the bushes. There is, perhaps, at the heart of every composition, the door to a great mystery you might not even have realized you were bracketing. The Hockney joiner that most haunts me is called 'My Mother, Bolton Abbey.' This is not a grid but a scatter. The same woman my father met that afternoon is seated in a cemetery, and the Polaroids of her begin to spill downward, giving the whole frame a gravitational pull. Hockney's sister describes their mother in the documentary 'David Hockney: A Bigger Picture': 'She was a very great power. She had a very great emotional power that's a bit hard to describe. That pulled you in.' When I recently ask my father about the portrait he shot of Hockney and his mother, he begins to reminisce about his own late mother sitting on the porch of the house where he grew up. He recalls a man who would visit: 'I asked him once, 'What's the deal with you coming around here, hanging around my mother?' He said, 'You know, when I was in jail, my mother died, and they wouldn't let me out to come and see her. So I picked somebody to be a mother to me, and it was your mother.'' The image he took of Hockney has become a hall of mirrors, an entrance into the very notion of what a mother means. What it means to lose her. The next slide is a quotation by Roland Barthes about his own mother in 'Camera Lucida': 'I dream about her, I do not dream her. And confronted with the photograph, as in the dream, it is the same effort, the same Sisyphean labor: to reascend, straining toward the essence, to climb back down without having seen it, and to begin all over again.' In the first essay I wrote about collage, I talked about how they have an air of mistake. Like spilling something. Capturing the weird way that one moment is every moment, which is also death. Or as Hockney puts it in the 'The Bigger Picture,' 'It's now that's eternal, actually.' I am writing this while visiting Santa Monica, which exists through the collage of memory since I left years ago. The first thing I do when I get here is drive through my old neighborhood, hungry to see the way time and distance have warped the familiar contours of buildings and trees and streets that served as the entirety of my early childhood world. I enter into my old neighborhood with a fluttering in my periphery where new construction or paint camouflages lines and angles and patches of scenery until the unmistakability of my childhood street reveals itself. I look for the jade plant in front of our apartment building, whose leaves I would press with my thumbnail while waiting for my parents to come downstairs. I look for the grate that would make a cha-choonk sound as the car passed over it on the way into the garage, signaling home when I was a child asleep in the backseat. I weep my ugliest, snottiest cry at an awkward intersection, looking for the place where Blockbuster used to be, happy that the library is still there. Parsing which businesses remain. Which left turns are the way I left them, framed by the corner of a blue-gray building I can only see when I'm dreaming. Even though many of Hockney's joiners were taken in his own California home, they blur with our own family photographs. They are the slippage of places and people, the grief you can feel for the way someone's face was held by a particular slant of light only moments ago. If you tear yourself away from a place too quickly, the maw of memory will ask you to re-leave it over years and years. My students and I end the semester by reading a book where poems and essays and operas arrange themselves across the page like children on a preschool floor. Some cup, some rove, some cascade. Aisha Sabatini Sloan is an essayist and the author of four books, including 'Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit' and 'Captioning the Archives,' which she co-authored with her father, photographer Lester Sloan.
Time Out
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
£19 tickets to David Hockney's ‘Bigger & Closer' at Lightroom - London
Highlights Experience 60 years of Hockney's art through stunning large-scale projections in the heart of London Cutting-edge laser projection and immersive audio system Tickets from £19 When and where? April 30 - June 29, 2025 at Lightroom, Kings Cross Time Out says Famed for his contribution to the pop art movement of the '60s, painter, stage designer, and photographer David Hockney takes us on a personal journey through 60 years of his art in a fascinating immersive exhibition. Using large-scale laser projection and a cutting-edge immersive audio system in a remarkable new eight-metre - tall space in King's Cross, the English artist shows us the world through his eyes, with commentary on his process , and a specially composed score by Nico Muhly. This experience is a true celebration of his use of photography, polaroid collages and much more . Box office & ticket enquiries Time Out offers@ Monday to Friday | 9.30 am - 5.30 pm Lightroom tickets@ | 0300 303 4216 Monday to Friday | 9.00 am - 8.00 pm Saturday | 10.00 am - 8.00 pm Sunday and Bank Holidays | 10.00 am - 6.00 pm Need to know Please note this offer is subject to a strict no refunds or exchanges policy. Please ensure you are booking for the correct date before purchasing. This is valid for a ticket to 'David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away)'. This booking is only valid for your selected date/time option. Start time: 10 am to 7 pm (entry times may vary per day). Upon arrival at the box office, please present your booking confirmation barcode to the Ticketing Desk (adjacent to the front doors) for your tickets to be printed off prior to going downstairs to the main ticket scanners. Please note the barcode can't be scanned by itself from your mobile device. This exhibition has a timed entry, please ensure you arrive in time to enter the slot on your ticket. Your entry slot runs for 30 minutes after and is inclusive of the time on your ticket – for example, if your ticket is for 3 pm, you can enter any time from 3 pm until 3.29 pm. One complete loop lasts approximately 50 minutes. You are welcome to stay for longer. For further information including frequently asked questions, please see here. Location: 12 Lewis Cubitt Square, London N1C 4DY. Tickets cannot be cancelled, amended, exchanged, refunded or used in conjunction with any other offer. For full terms and conditions, please see here.
