DAVID HOCKNEY AT THE HEONG GALLERY DOWNING COLLEGE
@David Hockney
The Heong Gallery Gallery sits quietly inside the gates of Downing College, and provides a cool space for art. Designed by Caruso St. John it opened in 2016 and has already staged some great exhibitions. This David Hockney extension to the Fitzwilliam Museum is especially compelling. On the far wall is the work depicted above. Is that Ed Sheeran on the left ? Yes - and the other figures , including the artist are all constructed by means of intense use of modern imaging, each figure required hundreds of shots. The group contemplate a skull that presides over the room from the top of the stacks. Echoes of Damian Hirst? Yet as ever more explicit and available.
@David Hockney
The picture above is a concentration of the artist’s attention on one particular moment. The Scrabble Game below is the opposite. Here he widens our perceptions of the scene and dwells on the individuality of each player, it takes the eye around the group in a way a rectangular depiction cannot do. This is an earlier use of collage but the spirit of inquiry into each feature of the game including the cat does show David Hockney’s further exploration through photography manipulated, into a realm of unconventional presentation where small detail can emerge and the viewer joins in the visual celebration of each participant .
@David Hockney - Game of Scrabble
@David Hockney
Above is the artist, modelled on David Hockney’s own father. He is surrounded by the tools of the trade, which artists have deployed over the centuries to help the better depiction of their work. Whether it’s the Camera Lucida, used for sketch portraiture by Ingres famous for his skills as a realist sketcher, ( David Hockney’s homage to this technique is in the Fitzwilliam, a series of Gallery attendants) - and the camera obscura, a hugely popular device which took Europe by storm more than three. hundred years ago. There’s one in Bristol and in Cadiz.
“When a human being is looking at a scene the questions are: What do I see first? What do I see second? What do I see third? A photograph sees it all at once- in one click of the lens from a single point of view - but we don’t. And it’s the fact that it takes us time to see it that makes the space.”
The Heong show opens with a meticulous drawing from David Hockney’s early arrival from Bradford School of Art ,at the Royal College.It concludes with the wall length digital experiment we began with.( far above)
Do not fail to watch by the way, the amazing film from 1988. It is a delightful forty minutes in the company of a genial unhurried David Hockney, youthful concentrated thoughtful. It films two scrolls from China with a century between them. They both show the visit of the Emperor down the great river Yangtze to his people. David Hockney is fascinated by the scroll, it has no edges, you can roll it our and see it at any point .And the difference between the two scrolls in artistic terms he argues shows a dramatic shift of emphasis in the century between them. The first seventeenth century work is centred on the thousands of tiny figures who await their Lord’s coming. Each man woman baby and animal has its own individuality. Rather like Ai Wei Wei’ sunflower seeds or figures they are unalike. The next century the outlook, the vision has changed. Now there are undistinguished crowds of people, often shown from the back , uniformly. David Hockney explains the connection between perspectives and God. And between the individual and warfare. In a diagram he draws,, with the works of art there, it is all much clearer than words can describe ( unsurprisingly). In the lovely Heong, in their special chairs this is a wonderful experience that awaits you. It will change your own perspective in some way I guarantee.
