One of the most influential artists of our time, David Hockney (b.1937) takes over Cambridge this spring and summer with an exhibition across The Fitzwilliam Museum and The Heong Gallery, Downing College.
Through both traditional and futuristic ways of making art, the exhibition explores Hockney’s obsession with how we see the world, and how our world of time and space can be captured on the surface of a flat picture.
In his use of cameras, digital drawing, the iPad, and digital film, Hockney follows a tradition of creative experiments with optical devices that goes back from Ingres’ camera lucida to Canaletto’s camera obscura and to the birth of Renaissance naturalism in the 15th century.
In The Fitzwilliam Museum’s picture galleries, Hockney’s drawings, paintings and digital artworks are shown in a series of provocative encounters with works by artists including Vincent Van Gogh, Claude Monet, John Constable and Andy Warhol.
The display at Heong Gallery charts Hockneys’ pioneering modern experiments in bringing hand, eye, and optical instrument together from the 1960s to the present day, with the iconic Grand Canyon I (2017) among the many celebrated works on display.
