David Hockney’s latest self-portrait, painted in Normandy, will be on view for the first time in a new exhibition of the artist’s work opening at the University of Cambridge.
Hockney’s Eye: The Art and Technology of Depiction, explores the ways in which the renowned British artist sees and depicts art. It will open in March across the university’s Fitzwilliam Museum and the Heong Gallery, Downing College.
Alongside the self-portrait, which was painted last November, the exhibition features a number of other works not publicly seen before in the UK.
Jane Munro, a co-curator at the Fitzwilliam Museum, said the exhibition was the first “to give serious scholarly scrutiny to Hockney’s ideas as well as his art”.
Through paintings, drawings, iPad paintings and video, to optical devices and innovative 3D modelling, she said the show “explores Hockney’s views about how the art of the past was created, what he learned from it and how he transformed it”.
Hockney has been known to criticise both photography and linear “Renaissance” perspective for its lines receding to a single point, saying they are untrue to our real experience of the visual environment.
“The world is big,” he has written. “The eye is connected to the mind … we see with memory … A photograph sees it all at once – in one click of the lens from a single point of view – but we don’t.”
It was a visit to a exhibition by the draughtsman Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres at the National Gallery in 1999 that triggered Hockney’s interest in the use of optical tools by artists before the advent of photography in 1839.
He said optical instruments “do not draw for you”, an idea that proved controversial among art historians and which featured in his 2001 book Secret Knowledge.
In the Fitzwilliam Museum’s picture galleries, Hockney’s drawings, paintings and digital artworks will be displayed alongside historic works by artists including William Hogarth, Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, John Constable and Andy Warhol.
The display at the Heong Gallery will chart Hockney’s pioneering approaches to capturing space and visual reality from the 1960s to the present day. Starting with a drawing made while at the Royal College of Art in 1959, the display will move on to his iconic American paintings of the 60s and early 70s, photo collages from the 80s, and an early digital drawing.
It will culminate in a wall-length digital work featuring the artist’s recent experiments with digital photography.
A selection of drawings he made using the camera lucida in 1999-2000, including Ian McKellen and Damien Hirst, will be on show in the Dutch Gallery. Hockney’s After Hobbema (Useful Knowledge) 2017, will hang alongside Meindert Hobbema’s The Avenue at Middelharnis, 1689 on loan from the National Gallery.
Martin Gayford, co-curator of Hockney’s Eye and an author who has written numerous books with Hockney, said the exhibition was a “new look at the artist’s own work, seeing it as lifelong quest to find new ways to represent the world around us, pictures that are closer to human experience; simultaneously the exhibition considers art history from Hockney’s point of view, placing his pictures next to impressionist landscapes and Georgian portraits.”
Luke Syson, the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, said it was an “exhibition that we think will feel at home in a place where the arts and sciences meet on equal terms”.
