DAVID HOCKNEY in Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo

The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo is holding the DAVID HOCKNEY Exhibition from Saturday, July 15 to Sunday, November 5, 2023. This is the first major solo exhibition in Japan in 27 years by David Hockney (b. 1937-, England), one of the most innovative painters of our time and one of the most popular artists in the world.
For more than 60 years, Hockney has produced diverse works in a variety of fields including painting, drawing, print work, photography, and stage design; however, he has always turned his attention to nature and the people around him.
For those unfamiliar with Hockney, this exhibition will be a rare opportunity to experience his world through more than 120 works, including many of his representative works created in the UK and Los Angeles, as well as his recent masterpieces and new works. In addition, visitors will be able to see works created with iPad, which he has been using since 2010, making this exhibition an enjoyable moment of new discoveries even for those already familiar with his works.

What One Can Feel Now That COVID-19 Is Coming to an End
The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo houses approximately 150 works by Hockney and held the exhibition “David Hockney: Prints 1954 – 1995” in 1996, shortly after the opening of the museum. This long-awaited solo exhibition was conceived as a result of this ongoing relationship between the artist and the museum, and is realized with his full cooperation.
The first chapter of the exhibition, “DO REMEMBER THEY CAN’T CANCEL THE SPRING,” introduces works featuring the trumpet daffodil, a popular flower in Europe that heralds the arrival of spring. One of the works, “No.118, 16th March 2020”, from “The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020”, which was released online in March 2020, is a modest but definite beacon of light amid the spread of the unknown infectious disease of COVID-19 across the world.

For those of us who are currently trying to move on from such moments of confusion and anxiety, the works created in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic may have messages that only those of us living in this era can sense, transcending differences in nationality, culture, and generation. We would like you to enjoy works that you can only come across now, in 2023, after overcoming difficult times.

At 86, Hockney continues to innovate his art.
David Hockney was born in Bradford, England, in 1937, and studied at the Bradford College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London. Upon moving to Los Angeles in 1964, he came into the international spotlight with his works depicting life in sunny California. For over sixty years, he has explored and experimented with image-making. Currently based in Normandy, France, he continues to actively create new works.
A major retrospective of his work was organized by Tate Britain, the Centre Pompidou, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2017 in honor of his life as he celebrates his 80th birthday. The exhibition broke the record for the number of visitors at Tate Britain with about a half million people. David Hockney is one of the most versatile artists of the 20th and 21st centuries.

A New 90-Meter-Long Work and a World Premiere Self-Portrait
This exhibition features one of his latest self-portraits, which is exhibited for the first time in the world, in addition to many of his representative works produced in various locations in the UK and Los Angeles.
Also on view in Japan for the first time is a 10-meter-wide by 3.5-meter-high oil painting entitled “The Arrival of Spring, Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty eleven),” created in 2011 in East Yorkshire, England, as well as 12 large sized iPad drawings printed on paper. These are among some of his best works that capture the dynamic of the budding season through a rich sense of color, so you can’t miss them.
His new 90-meter-long masterpiece “A Year in Normandie,” created on iPad during a lockdown due to COVID-19, will provide you with an unprecedented art experience.

Overview (8 chapters)

DO REMEMBER THEY CAN’T CANCEL THE SPRING
Two works are displayed side by side in this chapter, one from 1969 with the same yellow daffodil as the subject, and the other from 2020 with a message of encouragement for the anxious minds of the chaos caused by COVID-19.
Hockney is always looking to his surroundings, which reflects the artist’s remarkable skill and free-spirited attitude in choosing the precise media and techniques according to the work.

TOWARDS FREEDOM
Hockney enrolled at the Royal College of Art in London in 1959. He attempted to develop his own styles of expression and engaged with subject matters closely related to his inner self, including homosexuality.
Hockney, who saw Pablo Picasso’s exhibition at the Tate Gallery in 1960, was strongly impacted by the artist’s sheer creativity supported by great command of style.

CHANGING LIGHT
This chapter introduces Hockney’s works depicting swimming pool surfaces reflecting sunlight just after he moved to Los Angeles in 1964, featuring his “Lithographic Water” series, which he began working on in 1978, and his 2010 acquisition of an iPad, which instilled him with a new sense of awareness in terms of the perception of light.

PORTRAIT
In this chapter, different portraits are presented. “Double Portrait,” a series of portraits of two people that Hockney began in the late 1960s, focuses on people with whom he has close relationships. These portraits reflect the artist’s calm and composed gaze as he carefully observes those in front of him so as to capture their very personality.

WIDER PERSPECTIVES
In the 1980s, Hockney was convinced that the traditional one-point perspective in Western art was insufficient in expressing reality, so he engaged in various experiments in order to reproduce the sense of space obtained through the human experience of “seeing” within a two-dimensional surface. “The Blue Guitar,” a collection of prints that redefine multiple perspectives in Cubism, and the “Moving Focus” series, his photographic collages made by assembling a succession of photographs, are some of the works featured in the exhibition.

EN PLEIN AIR
Hockney began painting landscapes in Yorkshire, England in 1997. He brought innovation to the tradition of landscape painting established by the Barbizon and Impressionist painters.
In “The Four Seasons, Woldgate Woods (Spring 2011, Summer 2010, Autumn 2010, Winter 2010),” nine cameras simultaneously capture the same landscape in each of the four seasons of spring, summer, fall, and winter, recreating a complex process of visual experience.

THE ARRIVAL OF SPRING IN EAST YORKSHIRE
In 2010, upon realizing that the ever-changing aspects of nature from late winter to early summer could not be fully expressed within the scope of a single painting, Hockney came up with the idea to produce it as a series composed of multiple works, using an iPad he acquired in April that year. The result is “The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty eleven),” comprised of one large-scale oil painting and a series of fifty-one iPad drawings. In the exhibition, the oil painting is exhibited with 12 iPad drawings.

A YEAR IN NORMANDY
Hockney settled in Normandy in March 2019. The following year, as the global lockdowns continued with the spread of COVID-19, he took up the challenge to complete his large, 90-meter-long work, “A Year in Normandy.” As an unprecedented visual experience, it is a picture that allows viewers to immerse themselves in the pictorial space while being able to breathe deeply and walk around freely as one wishes.