David Hockney — Rétrospective — Centre Georges Pompidou — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: June 21 → October 23, 2017

In collaboration with London’s Tate Britain and the Metropolitan Museum of New York, the Centre Pompidou is to present the most comprehensive retrospective ever devoted to the work of David Hockney.

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The exhibition celebrates the artist’s 80th birthday, retracing his entire career through more than 160 works (paintings, photographs, engravings, video installations, drawings and printed works), including his most iconic paintings (swimming pools, double portraits and monumental landscapes) and some of his most recent creations.

It focuses in particular on Hockney’s interest in modern technologies for the production and reproduction of visual images. Moved by a constant concern to ensure a wide circulation for his work, he has successively taken up the camera, the fax machine, the computer, the printer, and most recently the iPad. For him, artistic creation is an act of sharing.

David Hockney, Bigger Trees Near Warter or/ou Peinture sur le motif pour le Nouvel Age Post-Photographique, 2007, 0 Huile peinte sur 50 toiles — 182,90 × 365,80 cm © David Hockney — Photo : Prudence Cuming Associates — Collection Tate, London

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Ever since the 1950s, David Hockney has been producing joyful, inventive and exploratory work.

Embracing the legacy of the founders of modern painting, he took from Matisse the use of intense and expressive colour and the goal of making each painting a celebration of the joy of life, from Picasso his stylistic freedom and his invention of a way of seeing — Cubism — capable of taking account of the movement, the passage of time, inherent in perception. Hockney has constantly shown that the cultivated eye and practised hand are still the best tools for achieving an ample and plenteous representation of the world. To the supposed obsolescence of painting in the age of technology, he has countered images drawing on photography, the fax machine, the photocopier, the moving image, the graphics tablet… The sixty years of artistic activity covered by the retrospective show that the paintings of a hedonistic and superficial California for which he is famous have acted to obscure the complexity of a body of work that today can only be seen as a learned and complex inquiry into the nature and status of images and the phenomenological laws that govern their conception and perception.