Art - exhibitions

David Hockney
1960 – 1968: A Marriage of Styles
14 November 2009 – 24 January 2010

Hockney in the 60s was that rare thing – an artist at the forefront of the avant-garde of the day, and a well-known public figure. With his Yorkshire accent, bleached blond hair, owlish glasses and frank homosexuality he stood out at the Royal College of Art in London amongst a brilliant generation of young artists, many of whom would join the front ranks of British Pop Art.

Hockney became famous while still a student there. Painting in his cubicle became a kind of performance, often in front of visitors. He grew up in public, and this exhibition offers a portrait of the artist as a young man, in London and Los Angeles. His work of the time is marked by a unique pictorial wit and is relentlessly inventive. It is informed in equal measures by both art and life - by the books he was reading, places he was visiting, conversations he was having, people he desired, lifestyles he aspired to and the art that inspired him.

Hockney at this time was playing with a multitude of styles. His breakthrough works were inspired by the abstract painting of the time, but they departed from it with their use of autobiographical messages, often code that referred to his current crushes, including his Doll Boy, Cliff Richard.

It is an exhibition full of allusions – to the homoerotic poetry of Walt Whitman and CP Cavafy, to Egyptian archaeology, to Modernism, children’s drawings, furtive graffiti and the flat perfection of commercial art.

It is his work from the end of the period, when Hockney was living mostly in Los Angeles, that is most closely associated with Pop Art. His paintings of swimming pools, male sunbathers and manicured lawns are iconic, stylised, abstracted and preconceived – they project a sensuous, utopian ideal. He had abandoned the use of text, but not the sense of paintings as signs rather than images. His work from the time is never simply a window on reality. Instead it makes you aware that you are looking at a fiction composed of elements of reality – in that sense, he is an important forerunner of what would become known as Postmodernism.

Hockney himself is now painting in his native Yorkshire after many years. He continues to marry styles, on canvas, in photography and on his cherished iPhone.