David Hockney: Current
A major illustrated volume providing new insight into renowned artist David Hockney’s oeuvre and illuminating works created over the past ten years
David Hockney is recognized as one of the most influential British artists of the past century. Born in 1937, he has dedicated his life to drawing, oil painting, printmaking, set design, and photo collage. More recently, he has extended his practice into watercolor, charcoal, multi-camera video installation, and digital drawing that embraces touchscreen technology.
Hockney rose to prominence as an artist in the 1960s when he began honing his naturalistic painting style. He has worked consistently in the genres of portraiture, landscape, and still life, often with bright colors recalling the Pop movement, but he has continually embraced new materials and technologies throughout his celebrated career.
David Hockney: Current accompanies an exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia that will include his extraordinary large-scale iPad digital drawings and Cubist multi-viewpoint video works―bodies of work that have seen Hockney bring the same focus he is renowned for in his portraiture to the landscape. Eighty-one acrylic portraits are also presented along with recent experiments in perspective in the media of painting, photography, and digital compositing.
2036 color illustrations
Author
Simon Maidment is Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia.
Bowen Li is an art writer.
Martin Gayford is a writer and art critic. His books include Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud; Modernists and Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney and the London Painters; A History of Pictures: From the Cave to the Computer Screen and Spring Cannot Be Cancelled: David Hockney in Normandy, both with David Hockney; Shaping the World: Sculpture from Prehistory to Now, with Antony Gormley; Love Lucian: The Letters of Lucian Freud, 1939–1954, with David Dawson; Venice: City of Pictures; and How Painting Happens (and why it matters).
Barbara Bolt is Director of Research at the Victorian College of the Arts, Australia.
Edith Devaney is Senior Curator at the Royal Academy of Arts, Australia