These are crucial distinctions both from an aesthetic and formal perspective. Other queer artists, such as Doron Langberg, have expressed that Hockney helped them draw the line between queer art and representations of queer life. While not exactly related, Casteel’s work borrows from Hockney’s ability to take a community that is often misrepresented by the general public, give it a visual language of its own, and a platform onto which it can grow. For instance, artist Jordan Casteel paints portraits of black men to consider issues of masculinity. Rather, his focus is on the body - the ultimate object of desire. Hockney doesn’t choose to show the man’s face. In Man in Shower in Beverly Hill, Hockney explicitly portrays the male body in all its sensuality, blatantly exclaiming his proximity to his subject. He was blatantly vocal about the symbolism in his paintings, his varying lines of inquiry, and to that effect, has provided a theoretical framework for artists that came after him.
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This was a perfect excuse for a psychological study.įrom the moment he arrived in California, Hockney made it a point to produce explicit paintings and never hide their signification. Hockney has said that, while he was working on the portrait, he couldn’t help but ask himself what kept them together, what happened to the couple after the painting was done. His most significant double portrait was that of Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy. He returned to sensuality, focused on shower scenes, and started working with double portraits, including some that have now become iconic trademarks of Hockney’s oeuvre. This was Hockney’s way of fusing art and reality to focus on a formal analysis of his immediate world. Hockney never accepted any commissioned portraits, so his works were by nature intrinsically personal. Today, it’s hard to look at the reflections of the sun on water without Hockney in mind. The house in the hills, with a pool and staggering views. It’s an aesthetic that to this day still exists in Los Angeles. I remember going to the Stahl House, staring at the pool, and imagining all of Hockney’s boys pulling themselves out, tan, shimmering. Most notoriously, in 1971, he painted Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), which captured Peter Schlesinger, his partner at the time, swimming to the surface of a pool and Hockney looking down at him. He painted men sleeping near/entering/leaving swimming pools, naked men showering, and friends going about their lives. It is out of this need to portray gay life that Hockney started formulating his hedonistic, sun-bathed image of California. Hockney loved to nestle himself at the intersection of the two, though his version of Abstract Expressionism had less to do with gestural spurts of color than it did with the intentional and calculated accumulation of color to form an explosive whole.ĭavid Hockney. When Hockney first started his career in late 50s/early 60s England, the art world was concerned with finding ways to bridge the gap between the rising impact of Abstract Expressionism and the fading (though it never really will) glory of Formalism. Ultimately, Hockney looked at oppression not as a threat, but as a challenge to shock, subvert, and shake up heteronormative structures. The exhibition looks back at Hockney’s legacy, one that gave voice to so many of us and provided aspiring artists with the tools and confidence to explore their own vocations.
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Hockney was an artist who defied generally-accepted social structures and led his life as an openly gay man in a world that systematically oppressed and silenced those who did not conform.
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Museum-goers are given access to Hockney’s world, from his early work, where he cheekily addressed his difficulties grappling with the Formalist art movement, to his most famous swimming pool and male nude paintings, to his later, more technology-driven productions. This is the first time in a generation that Hockney’s work is exhibited so massively in North America.