May 15, 2012 – September 30, 2012
David Hockney: A Bigger Picture
Landscape, Scale and Multiple Viewpoints at Guggenheim Bilbao
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Bilbao, Spain
David Hockney: A Bigger Picture examined the central role of landscape across the artist’s career while concentrating on the extraordinary body of work he produced after returning to East Yorkshire. Presented at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao from May through September 2012, the exhibition brought together nearly 190 paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, iPad works and multi-screen videos.
Rather than treating landscape as a fixed view observed from a distance, Hockney constructed environments that surrounded the viewer. Monumental scale, repeated motifs and shifting viewpoints transformed roads, trees and seasonal change into investigations of how space is experienced over time.
Landscape Without a Fixed Center
Hockney’s landscapes rarely depend on a single point of perspective. Roads curve toward and away from the viewer, groups of canvases extend beyond the normal proportions of a painting and individual places are reconstructed from repeated acts of observation.
The Yorkshire works demonstrate how familiarity can deepen rather than exhaust a subject. Hockney returned to the same woods, tunnels and fields in different seasons, allowing changes in color, growth and weather to become structural elements of the image.
Large multipanel paintings also altered the viewer’s physical relationship to the work. Seeing the entire composition required distance, while examining its individual passages required movement across the gallery.
Painting, Drawing and Moving Image
Traditional and digital media appeared together throughout the exhibition. Oils and charcoal drawings shared the galleries with sketchbooks, iPad images and multi-camera videos, revealing continuity rather than opposition between Hockney’s methods.
The iPad allowed color and line to be developed rapidly, while the playback of recorded marks made the construction of an image visible. Multi-screen films extended that process into time by presenting several simultaneous views of a journey through the landscape.
Organized by the Royal Academy of Arts in collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and Museum Ludwig, A Bigger Picture demonstrated that Hockney’s return to landscape was not a retreat into tradition. It became another stage in his long investigation of perspective, perception and pictorial space.
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