David Hockney unveils new works on perspective created in Los Angeles
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Version 0 of 1. “I just go on and I’m going to go on until I fall over,” said an indefatigable David Hockney as he opened a show of new work in London on Thursday. “I’ve always got something to do and I’m going to do it. Artists don’t retire ... I like working, what else is there to do?” Hockney was speaking at the first view of a new exhibition showcasing his most recent paintings and photographs made in Los Angeles. The works are an exploration of Hockney’s lifelong interest in perspective and the issues and problems around representing a 3D world on a flat surface. They feature group portraits and experimental works he describes as “3D photographs without the glasses”. Hockney, aged 77, returned to LA after a nearly a decade living in Bridlington, painting the changing Yorkshire landscape. On a cold, drizzly May day back in the UK, he said he was happy in California. Related: David Hockney: ‘Just because I’m cheeky, doesn’t mean I’m not serious’ “I have a life there that suits me,” he said. “I don’t go out much, I go to bed at 9pm, I get up and go in the studio ... I live in the studio and it’s the only place I really want to be.” He is back in London, where he keeps a home, for the show at the gallery which represents him, Annely Juda. It’s not been an entirely fun return to the city, he admitted: “I’ve had a lot of trouble with my teeth. I spent four hours in the dentist’s yesterday so I haven’t been out that much, but I don’t go out much now.” What is exciting him is his work, he said, including his photographs, which have involved him taking hundreds of up-close photographs of heads, jackets, walls, tables and so on, and putting them together like a collage or jigsaw. The result is a a kind of 3D photograph, which he is hugely excited by, he said. “It is only recently I’ve realised what digital photography can do. You can now really play with perspective and make new kinds of pictures.” Other works on display include portraits of friends playing cards, a subject tackled throughout art history by artists from Caravaggio to Cézanne. Hockney said his friends had been playing cards unprompted and they made a very good subject. “They sit, they ignore you, they play,” he said. The artist, whose hearing is failing, spent eight productive years in Bridlington, culminating in the blockbuster A Bigger Picture exhibition at the Royal Academy in 2012. He left the UK in the summer of 2013, following the death of a studio assistant, Dominic Elliott, in March. An inquest found Elliott died after drinking drain cleaner at the end of a drink and drugs binge. In an interview with the Guardian at the weekend, Hockney revealed he did not paint for four months after Elliott’s death, the longest he has gone without picking up a brush. He said: “The only thing I did in Brid after Dominic’s death was the charcoal drawings of the arrival of spring in 2013, and I nearly gave it up. I nearly gave it up twice, actually.” After many months painting indoors he may slowly be moving to the fresh air. “I’ve just started painting my garden now.” • David Hockney: Painting and Photography is at Annely Juda Fine Art 15 May–27 June. |