For over 50 years, David Hockney has been a dominant force in contemporary art. A new career-spanning show at the Honolulu Museum of Art brings the artist back to Hawaii for the first time in many years, with an exhibition of over 100 pieces in various media documenting Hockney’s journey from the 1950s up through the pandemic years.
“We were drawn to different time periods, and making sure we were representing earlier time periods, through to later and different media – the photo collages, the photographs of drawings, and iPad, iPhone, and other digital drawing,” said Katherine Love, a co-curator of the show alongside Catherine Whitney, the museum’s director of curatorial affairs.
The Homa exhibition is a large, well-organized show, compellingly arranged on walls of bold red, blue and white, leading audiences on multiple journeys though Hockney’s ever-evolving use of the visual form. Broken out into six sections, it begins with some of Hockney’s earliest works, working its way up to digital paintings that he made via iPhone and iPad during the pandemic. One of its organizing principles are the multiple dualities that Love and Whitney observed in Hockney’s work.
“One thing we really wanted to play with in the dualities is the idea of interiors and exteriors,” said Whitney. “There’s also a sense of stillness and tension, and also balance and calm. There are just so many contrasting binaries in the work throughout his career. He has an incredible way of contrasting opposites in a celebratory way.”
David Hockney: Perspective Should Be Reversed, Prints from the Collections of Jordan D Schnitzer and His Family Foundation centers itself around an idea that Hockney, now 86, has pursued for years – that of upending perspective as it is typically pursued in western art. This can be seen in his breakthrough works with Polaroid snapshots, in which he built huge collages out of Polaroids, building scenes that had countless perspectives embedded in them. For Hockney, this is truer to how we perceive reality than a painting consisting of just a single vanishing point. It also speaks to Hockney’s infatuation with integrating the latest technology into his artistic output, something that audiences can see throughout the exhibition. “Even though he’s experimenting with new technology and always trying new things, he’s always aware of what happened in the past,” said Whitney. “And he’s always interested in learning more about history and incorporating that into his work – sort of always moving beyond.”
In the painting Perspective Should be Reversed – a typically robust, inter-referential festival of individuals from Hockney’s universe, miniatures of the artist’s paintings, and a variety of different vanishing points – Hockney leaves a copy of TJ Clark’s Picasso and Truth right out in front where it is hard to miss, indicating debts that he owes to the great Spaniard. In fact, one of this show’s strengths is how ably it teases out many of the artistic links between the two.
“Hockney has been really fascinated with Picasso and how he broke away from what was expected representationally,” said Love. “Cubism did really experimental work with thinking about the use of space in different ways. Hockney is really interested in that same idea of how we perceive the world around us.”
As part of the Picasso theme, the Honolulu show includes two of Hockney’s Polaroid collages, in which he pioneered his ideas of bringing cubism into the photographic realm. “One of the issues Hockney has with traditional photography is that it’s from a static viewpoint,” said Love. “But humans experience looking around the world – we can move our eyes. So how can you translate that experience into a picture?” Multiple later works from the 2010s extend the ideas that he pioneered with these Polaroid collages – for instance, several see the artist honing his collage craft into photorealist offerings in which tables, chairs and hung canvases let Hockney embed countless perspectives, while doppelgangers of himself and other intimates proliferate.
“It’s this kind of constant play with reality,” said Love. “What is reality, what is perception, what is assumed, what is known, what is created? What can I make you see?”
Perspective Should Be Reversed also includes a satisfying selection of works that Hockney has made exclusively on iPhones and iPads, using his fingers and a stylus. These include many that Hockney has made of the English countryside over the years, among them some of his popular Woldgate works, in which the artist spent months meticulously chronicling the arrival of spring through dozens of drawings. For these and other late works, Hockney revels in bright, often surprising colors and intricate lines. “Some of the late pieces, those late landscapes from Normandy with the rain on the pond, those are spectacular,” said Love. “I’m a colorist, so I’m kind of a sucker for anything that’s bright and amazing, and that’s why the Woldgate pieces really stunned me.”
Among the later works are standouts like Landscape with Shadows, a dazzling, cubist-inflected feast of colors, textures, and perspectives, and Rain on the Pond, which channels a solemn mood and includes innumerable raindrops beautifully bursting into rings on the titular pond. Although not quite as substantial-feeling or innovative as much of the earlier work in this show, these pieces are extremely pleasing, and offer a window into the current interests of a major figure in the art world.
Perspective Should Be Reversed draws on the collection of Jordan Schnitzer, scion of a wealthy Oregon family, one of the state’s leading real estate developers, and a longtime arts philanthropist. Schnitzer’s collection of Hockney’s work dates back decades, and the artist is among his most numerous holdings. “I gives me great joy to bring the work here,” said Schnitzer. “The collection allows a museum like this to get access to the best and biggest and brightest of the artist.” All in all, the Jordan Schnitzer family foundation has helped organize over 180 exhibitions.
Perspective Should Be Reversed is a true boon for Honolulu’s vibrant art museum – which has done great work in bringing a variety of contemporary art voices out to the middle of the Pacific – and it should not be missed by residents of and visitors to the island alike. “This is probably the biggest print show ever that’s been exclusively of Hockney,” said Whitney, “so that’s pretty exciting. It’s amazing to show works from 1954 right up to 2022. We’re very thrilled to have it.”