On August 30th, on the occasion of the 5th anniversary of the establishment of the Mumu Art Museum in Beijing, the Mumu Art Community, with the Qianliang Hutong Museum as the core of the new museum, welcomed the exhibition "David Hockney: Big Splash - Tate Collection works and more". David Hockney is the holder of the highest auction price of paintings among living artists – late last year, Hockney's "Pool" series of masterpieces "Portraits of Artists (Pool and Two Portraits)" fell for $90.3125 million, setting a record for the highest price of a living artist's work.
The surging news saw at the scene that although the British artist born in 1937 did not attend the opening ceremony, the exhibition traced Hockney's artistic career since the 1950s with more than 100 works, and most of the exhibits on display came from the Tate Gallery collection in the United Kingdom, from which "we will see how Hockney has stepped through countless paths along the way and how he has become one of the world's greatest artists today." ”
David Hockney's solo exhibition at Tate
Qianliang Hutong Hall, the new building of Mumu Art Museum
Born in Bradford, England in 1937, Hockney attended bradford College of Art and then the Royal College of Art in London. In 1970, at the age of 33, he held his first solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, and since then he has attracted wide attention from critics and the public, and has created a series of world-famous works in succession for the next 60 years. Hockney's inspiration is plentiful, involving both popular visual elements and masterpieces by masters of classical and modern art. Based on traditional themes such as still lifes, portraits and landscapes, Hockney continues to exert his constant creativity and adventurous spirit, thinking and questioning the way we see the world and expressing it in two-dimensional pictures. Hockney himself has a deep affinity with China, having drawn inspiration and nourishment from traditional Chinese painting and painting theory in his past artistic practice, and he himself visited China in the 1980s and 2015, but this exhibition co-hosted with the Tate Museum in the United Kingdom is actually Hockney's first large-scale exhibition in China. It is a slight pity that the 82-year-old artist was unable to make the trip "due to physical reasons" to meet with the Chinese public who love him.
Exhibition site
With more than 100 works, the exhibition traces Hockney's artistic career since the 1950s, showing the endless possibilities revealed in his work, not only in oil painting, printmaking and drawing, but also in recent years he has been interested in new mediums such as photography and digital technology. Most of the exhibits are from the Tate Collection in the UK, including the artist's most iconic masterpieces, such as "The Bigger Splash" and "My Parents". In the foreword to the exhibition, it is written, "We will see how Hockney has stepped through countless trails along the way, exploring the nature of viewing and reproduction. And how this promising student in the art academy became one of the greatest artists in the world today. ”
Exhibition scene "Bigger Splash"
Children of "downright working-class families"
The Mumu Art Community, designed by Japanese architect Shuhei Aoyama, is part of the "Reconstruction Project" of Longfusi Street, a famous commercial district in old Beijing. The Qianliang Hutong Pavilion of the Mumu Art Museum, which has just been completed, and the surrounding construction sites are not clear on the dividing line of geographical division. Smelling the smell of dust and raw ash, I walked into the exhibition hall, only to find that it was actually rebuilt from a staff canteen and underground civil air defense fortifications with a more historical sense of age. In the middle of the entrance to the exhibition hall is David Hockney's recent work "In the Studio" – at the end of 2017, Hockney turned his camera lens to his studio, where his recent paintings, furniture, easels and large books on the tripod are located...
David Hockney, In the Studio, December 2017, 2017, Photographic Painting on Paper, Dibond Panel, 278.1×760.1 cm, 7th of 12 in the series, Tate Collection
The piece itself, titled "In the Studio," is a collage of more than three thousand photographs with a mesmerizing cgi cinematic effect. Hockney makes it look vivid but not very realistic, and the scribbleed treatment in the shadows makes the light seem irrational. Miniature versions of the paintings are reproduced in two dimensions, either on the easel or against the wall, but with a feeling of floating. Standing in the middle is Hockney himself! He wears a striped cardigan and a red-pink tie. In the view of curator Ms. Helen Little, the reason why Hockney's latest work is placed at the beginning of the exhibition is that "it clearly reflects the artist's three-dimensional relationship with time, space and motion, exploring within a two-dimensional plane." ”
David Hockney, The Woman and the Sewing Machine, 1954, Lithograph, 22.5 × 35.5 cm, Tate Collection
Bypassing "In the Studio", a detailed biography of the artist can be seen on the back of the exhibition wall. The first sentence of the opening sentence states that he came from a "downright working-class family" and that his artistic practice, which began in the 1950s, began. The Woman and the Sewing Machine is one of Hockney's 1954 prints. He was also a student at Bradford College of Art, where his main job at the time was to create sketches and cartoons for the school journal, and his early prints retained some of the characteristics of comics. In Woman and the Sewing Machine, Hockney experimented with a style of scene dominated by clumsy, cartoon-like characters. In particular, the model in this painting is Hockney's mother, Laura. Later, Hockney portrayed the image of his mother many times in different mediums.
David Hockney, Portrait of Mama III, 1985, Lithograph, 51.2×43.5 cm, Tate Collection
spray! "Bigger Splash"!
In 1963, a year after graduating from the Royal College of Art in London, Hockney went to Los Angeles for the first time, where he lived since 1964. Fascinated by the relaxed and cheerful atmosphere of life in California, he once commented: "The sun is shining here, and the pressure on people is much less than in New York... When I first arrived, I wasn't sure if there was any artistic atmosphere here, but the worry was superfluous. Between 1964 and 1971, Hockney created a large number of works on the theme of swimming pools. Around the age of 30, he began to move towards "naturalistic" painting, once focusing on depicting the most formless and transparent substance in nature, water. The Bigger Splash was written in 1967 while Hockney was teaching at the University of California, Berkeley. Naturally, it is the hottest "net red punch card" in this exhibition. The white frame mimics the white space around Polaroid's photographs, and the picture itself alludes to the immediacy of photography: there is a diving board on the picture, and no one splashes around. In this painting, the characters seem to be absent, but the diving board, the chair, and the splash are all proof of the presence of people, the picture is solidified and static, the sound seems to be absorbed by the building, and behind the silence reflects the inner excitement of the painter.
David Hockney, The Bigger Splash, 1967, Acrylic on Canvas, 242.5×244 cm, Tate Collection, London
David Hockney, Putting Water into the Pool, Santa Monica, 1964, Lithograph, 51.4×66.3 cm, Tate Collection
After the 1970s, Hockney returned to the UK from Los Angeles. During this period, his style of work changed again, especially the use of light and the form of depiction of figures, and the "psychological perspective" began to become a new dimension for observing his characters. The artist began creating a series of large-scale double portraits in 1968, and the 1970 acrylic on canvas painting Clark and Posey accurately documents the changes in his personal interests. The protagonists are Hockney's friends, the Clarkes. Created in their home, this piece combines realism with a highly concise style. Hockney thinks about composition by taking pictures, observing, and drawing drafts. In traditional portraiture, usually one of the two will look at the other, and the latter will look at the viewer outside the painting, forming a circular line of viewing. But "The Clarks and Posey" is unusual: the Clarkes look out of the painting from either side of a large open glass window in the center of the painting, and there is no communication between the eyes, showing a subtle emotional conflict. The audience, who looks at the picture from the center of the picture, becomes the focus of the couple's eyes and becomes the third party in this group of relationships.
David Hockney, The Clarkes and Posey Draft, 1970, Colored Lead on Paper, 35.5×43 cm, Tate Collection
David Hockney, The Clarkes and Posey, 1970-1, Acrylic on Canvas, 213.4×304.8 cm, Tate Collection
The oil painting My Parents on canvas, created a year before Hockney's father's death (1977), shows that his painting style shifted to the study of human behavior. The artist's mother is sitting, attentive and graceful, while his father, who seems to be sitting still, is reading a book by Aaron Sharf, Art and Photography. In addition, a book about Chardin and Proust's "Remembrance of The Watery Years" on the shelves are reminiscent of intimate family scenes from the past. Piero della Francesca's Baptism of Jesus (currently in the National Gallery) is reflected in a mirror and forms a triangular composition with the two figures in the painting. In the 1970s, Hockney's impressive achievements in the art world began to be made into films about his life and art, including The Diary of David Hockney, produced and distributed by Michael and Christian Blackwood, and Sensational, produced and distributed by Jack Hazen, which are also involved in this exhibition.
David Hockney, My Parents, 1977, oil on canvas, 182.9 × 182.9 cm, Tate Collection
Hockney's "Chinese Diary" and scroll paintings
Just like the "Water Splash" series of works in the 1960s, it has already alluded to the Chinese painting second truth of "empty mountains do not see people, but hear people's voices". David Hockney's own love affair with China is not undeniable, and for the first time, the exhibition will also show the artist's relationship with China and traditional Chinese painting. In 1981, Hockney visited China with the British poet Stephen Spender, where he co-authored The Diary of China, detailing their observations and anecdotes in Beijing, Xi'an, Hangzhou, Guilin, and Guangzhou. The book's afterword consists of a conversation between the two after returning to Los Angeles, and in Hockney's view, Guangzhou was the most dynamic city in China at that time, "the streets are full of people, different, and this is the only city where girls on the street wear skirts... The Cultural Square is the only place we have seen where people are really enjoying life and having entertainment. ”
Exhibition scene "David Hockney and China" section
Travels in China left Hornick with a large number of photographs and drawings. In addition, Chinese painting has a profound influence on his later creations in terms of painting theory, technique, and perspective, especially the composition and viewing methods of the long scroll "scattered perspective" and "moving steps to change the scenery". In a 1984 correspondence with the director of the Tate, Hockney couldn't hide his delight, "I think this [Chinese scroll painting] is the most condensed art form ever, with a very sophisticated way of dealing with time and space." In this exhibition, the rare "Kangxi Southern Tour Map" (volume 6) and other extremely important authentic works of ancient Chinese paintings are juxtaposed at the end of the entire exhibition area with Hockney's related important works, triggering power with dialogue between works, evoking perceptions and spiritual resonance beyond the limits of time, space and cultural language: In fact, since the 1980s, Hockney has begun to continuously practice the thinking and perception brought by Chinese painting in his works. One of the most well-known is that in 1987 he planned and directed the film "A Day Trip to the Grand Canal with the Emperor of China, or the Surface is Illusion and depth", in which Hockney uses the extremely important work of Qing Dynasty court painting and Wang Fei and others to paint "Kangxi Southern Tour" as an example, detailing how he traveled in the vastness and subtlety of Chinese scroll painting, and the way he felt a dynamic depiction of time and space.
Wang Yi, Song Junye, Yang Jin, et al., Kangxi Southern Tour Map (Volume VI), 1632-1717
David Hockney, Hotel Accatlan: The Next Day, 1984-5, lithograph, 73.5×96.2 cm, Tate Collection
David Hockney, The Forbidden City and Tiananmen, 1981, Mumu Art Museum Collection
"Finally", but not the end of the exhibition. According to the guide board, the audience can move to the Longfumu Cultural Center, 50 meters away, to continue to visit the final chapter of the exhibition. There are also surprises, in addition to continuing to present Hockney's 80th birthday, "the latest batch of works continues to refine his refutation of 'single point perspective' and his pursuit of new ways of viewing". It's also possible to realize the dream of "exhibiting with David Hockney" – hockney has always believed that art is a product of technique rather than history and has always been attracted to unconventional cartography, and in the past decade he has begun to use the rushes software on iPhones and iPads to depict the scenery outside the bedroom window, or simply take the equipment outside to sketch. During this exhibition, art lovers can also upload their own iPad paintings, and the Mumu Museum will select the best of them and the iPad works of the artist's deity to be displayed in the same frame.
At the end of the exhibition, the guide sign that guides the audience to another exhibition hall