David Hockney Exhibition - Tate Britain

On the 9th February 2017 at the Tate Britain, the David Hockney Exhibition finally began meaning that I was finally able to see his work in person. No photography was allowed in the exhibition so I took notes as I walked around.

The rooms the exhibition were in were very home-like, the layout of the rooms and made it feel as though you were walking from room to room in a house. The ceiling was slanted, making it look as though it was the inside of the roof and the rooms were painting homey colours, pale pink, grey, dark red etc.


In the first few rooms the pieces were very large, some were bigger than people. The style of the paintings seemed very child-like and simplistic. His work seemed to combine realism with abstract art, with some aspects looking very realistic such as the buildings and then other things like the swimming pool were more abstract. Some of his pieces have some unusual, bright colours however they still look quite realistic, especially from a distance. In some of his pieces he tended to use blocks of colours to create shading and tone in the piece.


In the room Naturalism, the work was quite small, and it was made up of mainly drawings. The pieces were mainly about A3, A2 size with the materials being ink, watercolour, crayon, graphite and charcoal.


In A Bigger Photograph it contained a lot of his photograph compositions which is the aspect of his work which I focused on for my personal investigation. The pieces were very big, Bill and Audrey was made of polaroid photographs, it was 12x12 polaroid images. The Kasmin piece was 12x9 polaroid photographs. Gregory Swimming was 8x15 Polaroid's. The Grand Canyon piece was the size of about 5 A2 portraits next to each other, it was a collage piece using lots of normal photographs that were placed together to make the landscape, the photographs were all different and of different zoom, and angles.

-my mother 8 A2 ish size photographs

-pearblossom - 4 a1 photographs layered 

Experiences of Space

Huge paintings 

Bright vivid colours

Mark making landscapes and rooms 

Shapes

Cubist like 

Can clearly see artist inspiration

Landcscape artist, the Spanish civil war, Picasso Van Gogh

Pop art

Experience of place 

Landscapes

Big work

Separate grid canvas is together on some to make piece like a grid

Some whole pieces also

Some have bright Vivid colours, mainly natural colours but some unusual colours / either wrong or too bright

The wolds

Huge pieces 6 or 8 big canvases

Or two giant ones

Natural colours

One had pink and blue strokes in sky - Gogh

Gogh style 

The road to thwing 

Six part study for bigger trees

Animated

Hawthorn blossom near rudston

A closer winter tunnel

May blossom on the roman road

Woldgate woods

The four seasons

Digital movement video 

Woldgate woods

Different angles

Not completely matching 

9 screens

Split videos

Yorkshire and Hollywood

The arrival of spring 2013 

25 charcoal drawings on paper

A1

Hollywood drawings a1 2 morning and evening

Garden paintings

Bright unusual colours 

Blocks and thick outlines dashes and lines shadows using different colour shades q

Big canvas

iPad drawings

Videos of drawing process big screens 

Portrait

People and house and objects 

Big landscape paintings- long



I really enjoyed seeing David Hockney's work in person. I didn't actually realise how large his pieces were until I saw them face to face. There was some work in the exhibition that no one had seen before and there were also digital, film collage pieces. I was very overwhelmed by the exhibition, it was breathtaking and a very memorable experience. I felt like I was walking through a journey of his life, it all seemed very personal and gave me a new perspective on his work and who he is as an artist. I am extremely happy and grateful to have been able to see this exhibition, it was very inspiring.