David Hockney to exhibit 20 iPad paintings at five of his favourite galleries
British master David Hockney is returning with his latest collection of artwork, with five identical exhibitions entitled ’20 Flowers and Some Bigger Pictures’ displaying his iPad-based still-life impressions of flowers he created over the pandemic.
Ditching his decades-long exlusive use of the same Los Angeles gallery, LA Louver, for the new show, Hockney will be using it as well as four of his other favourite galleries, Galerie Lelong in Paris, Annely Juda Fine Art in London, Pace in New York, and Gray in Chicago.
Interestingly, each exhibition has the exact same itinerary, boasting 20 of his iPad “paintings” from 2021, which recently debuted at Nice’s Musée Matisse. Adding to this fresh body of work is a new photo-based work from this year, which is yet to be shown. All of the exhibitions kick off in November bar Pace’s, which opens in the new year.
The founder of LA Lover, Peter Goulds, who first exhibited Hockney back in 1978, only two years after the establishment opened, told The Art Newspaper that the new collaborations came around naturally, as all five galleries wanted to show Hockney’s work.
“I don’t know if this has been done before, with five different galleries showing a single artist’s work,” he said. “We work with David Juda and Lucy Mitchell-Innes on travelling [Leon] Kossoff exhibitions, but I can’t think of a project like this.”
Hockney’s colourful paintings were made in Normandy, with the artist, 85, one of the most prominent long-time proponents of using Apple’s iPads and iPhones for the visual arts since they came on the market, allowing him to move away from the acrylic on canvas style that he created his most famous pieces on such as 1966’s Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool.
The forthcoming shows will also debut the large photographic work, 25th June 2022, Looking at the Flowers (Framed) (2022), which consists of a series of images stitched together to test perspective. The composite depicts Hockney looking at his 20 iPad compositions hanging in wood frames against a navy wall, with Hockney describing it as a “photographic drawing”.
’20 Flowers and Some Bigger Pictures’ dates:
- David Hockney: 20 Flowers and Some Bigger Pictures, Annely Juda Fine Art, London, 3 November-23 December
- David Hockney: 20 Flowers and Some Bigger Pictures, Galerie Lelong, Paris, 3 November-22 December
- David Hockney: 20 Flowers and Some Bigger Pictures, Gray, Chicago, 4 November-23 December
- David Hockney: 20 Flowers and Some Bigger Pictures, LA Louver, Los Angeles, 16 November 2022-7 January 2023
- David Hockney: 20 Flowers and Some Bigger Pictures, Pace, New York, 12 January-25 February 2023
