On view through 26 July 2025
In honor of David Hockney’s 88th birthday today, L.A. Louver is highlighting two works on paper by the artist that are currently on view in L.A. Louver Celebrates 50 Years as a complement to the spectacular painting Midsummer Tunnel - August 2006.
Created while the artist quarantined in his studio and residency in Normandy, Hockney’s 2021 series of twenty flower iPad paintings captures various arrangements of blooms set against a backdrop of gingham tablecloths and burgundy walls. “I was just sitting at the table in our house, and I caught sight of some flowers in a vase on the table,” Hockney explains. “A few days later I started another from the same position with the same ceramic vase. This took longer to do. I then realized if I put the flowers in a glass vase the sun would catch the water, and painting glass would be a more interesting thing to do. So then I was off.” In the first work of the series, 30th January 2021, The First One, small white buds and magenta blooms are nestled amongst neon foliage in a white ceramic vase. Capturing a spectrum of floral compositions with contrasting tones and textures, Hockney displays his propensity for balancing the central artistic elements of line, color, and perspective.
In Seven Trollies, Six and a Half Stools, Six Portraits, Eleven Paintings, and Two Curtains (2018), David Hockney once again reveals his prowess as a masterful manipulator of visual space, steadfast critic of the hegemony of one-point perspective, and insatiable technological innovator. In this work—part of a series of works Hockney refers to as photographic drawings—the artist turns his eye to his studio, continuing a career-long experimentation with multi-point perspective and composite photography. This time working digitally, Hockney and technology assistant John Wilkinson photographed each studio object—the trollies, stools, portraits, paintings, and curtains of the title—from every possible angle, feeding the photographs into software that seamlessly stitched them together into discrete, manipulable image-objects. Hockney then moved, spun, tilted, and placed the objects throughout the notional space of the studio, digitally altering color and adding light and shadow to achieve the final effect. The result is a fictionalized scene whose contents nonetheless vibrate with startling three-dimensionality and palpable realness.
David Hockney (British, b. 1937) has produced some of the most vividly recognizable and influential works of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Hockney gained notoriety in his midtwenties after receiving the Gold Medal from London’s Royal College of Art, and he quickly became associated with the British Pop Art movement. In the late 1960s Hockney relocated to California and established himself as a prolific figurative and landscape artist. He is perhaps best recognized for the works he produced there: brightly colored, large-scale evocative images of the Southern California lifestyle as well as domestic, intimate portraits of his friends, family, and lovers. Hockney’s works are notable for their quietness of subject, flatness of space, and subtle reduction of form. Throughout his career he has worked in a wide variety of media, including painting, drawing, collage, photography, and printmaking, often utilizing contemporary technologies that have included fax machines, laser photocopiers, tablet devices, and other digital instruments.
L.A. Louver is proud of its long representation of David Hockney, an association that dates back to 1978. We wish David a very happy birthday and invite you to view these three works in person, on view now in L.A. Louver Celebrates 50 Years through 26 July.
