David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition

by Richard Benefield, David Hockney, Sarah Howgate

Accompanying one of the most anticipated exhibitions of the past few years, this catalogue captures the grand scale and vibrant color of Hockney’s work of the twenty-first century. In the past decade, having returned to England after years on the California coast, David Hockney has focused his attention on both landscapes and portraits, all the while maintaining his fascination with digital technology. The resulting work is a fanfare of color and light, ranging in dimension from billboard- to letter-size, and is the basis for a thrilling new exhibition that promises to become one of the most popular in recent memory. This lush and impeccably produced catalogue features over 100 full-color works of art from museum collections and Hockney’s private studio, including such major new works as The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate Wood, The Bigger Message, and Bigger Yosemite. It also includes multiple-image galleries (spread over gatefolds) of some of his iPad drawings and self-portraits, plus film stills from the artist’s “Cubist” movies. Hockney’s own insight into this latest chapter of his career is found across the book’s pages and is accompanied by thoughtful commentary by renowned critic Lawrence Weschler and art historian Sarah Howgate.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction

228 pages, Hardcover

First published October 25, 2013

Reviews

[Vfields Don't touch my happy!]

At each of my visits to the Metropolitan Museum's first retrospective in thirty years of David Hockney's amazing body of work, I needed to know more about the artist. The exhibit was stunning and the book David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition filled-in the missing parts beautifully.

[Maud Guilfoyle]

Wonderful book! I usually favor color and paintings but I found the sensitive charcoal drawings full of light in the landscapes and portraits. The landscape paintings are lush and original. David Hockney said he wanted people to look at nature. When I look at his landscapes, even in book form, I feel as though I could walk right into them. Hockney has always embraced new technology and his ipad art has subtlety and control.

[Derek]

As a new fan of Hockney’s work, this was a great book to get familiarized with his recent exhibitions and general ethos as an artist. His landscapes are as good as it gets, ever!

[William West]

Good if perhaps overly, um, big survey of Hockney's recent works. For me, the most intriguing development in his art has been his embrace of a kind of cubism which Hockney interprets more literally and, perhaps, more sincerely than did Picasso or Braque. Using his I-Pad (yes) Hockney paints a portrait of a space, his native rural England, where he returned for several years, from one angle, then another from a slightly different angle, then prints them out on large square sheets, and fits the different angles together, giving a multi-angle depiction of one point of perspective. The "paintings" were paired with what I found to be even more exceptional "cubist movies" - video works spliced together in the same manner as the digi-paintings of the same part of England taken in different seasons. One room, with a cine-cubist depiction of a journey down a country road in four different seasons, was truly hypnotic, and made me think that "cubist cinema" may indeed be viable. The show was also a testament to how much work an artist can now produce in so short a time using emerging digital technologies. What you can do with a phone these days!

[Lydia]

The exhibition--Wonderful! 5 stars! This book--just good. Not sure if I want to be critical at all, I'm very happy to have a book that captures most of the exhibition. Plus more information about Hockney and tidbits of conversation are included. Hockney further describes the exhibit's importance of human perspective using our own eyes when painting. Painters painting "en plein air" are using multi-dimensional views as well as time, and the painting glows. There are 5 essays in the beginning of this book. Unfortunately they weren't edited (even I found incomplete sentences), and many things are repeated by the 3 "editors" across essays--but who's going to read these essays anyway? This is a coffee table book of beautiful images.