Originally presented in 2017 and in celebration of the extraordinary life of British artist David Hockney, Exhibition On Screen’s remarkable film David Hockney at the Royal Academy of Arts has returned to cinemas nationwide from this July for a limited run.
Introduced by Tim Marlow, Art Historian and Director of Artistic Programmes at the Royal Academy, London, this 80-minute film is thoughtfully directed by BAFTA award-winning documentary filmmaker Phil Grabsky for Seventh Art Productions. Featuring in-depth and insightful conversations with David Hockney throughout, this illuminating film explores two of Hockney’s most celebrated exhibitions at the Royal Academy in recent years – the 2012 ‘David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture’ – depicting the landscapes of Hockney’s native Yorkshire over time, and the contrasting 2016 show entitled ’David Hockney RA: 82 Portraits and 1 Still-Life’.
The first half of the film is dedicated to his major 2012 exhibition, ‘A Bigger Picture’ and explores Hockney’s return to the UK for prolonged periods of time, beginning in the late 1990s due to the terminal prognosis of his close friend and collector, Jonathan Silver, and the death of Hockney’s mother in 1999, aged 99 years. Encouraging Hockney to paint his Yorkshire homeland, Silver owned the Salt Mill in Saltaire, which inspired the featured work ‘Salt Mill, Saltaire, Yorkshire, 1997’ in tribute to his friend, who died the same year.
Also motivated by Hockney’s drives through the beautifully curling road from Bridlington to Wetherby during that time, other exhibited works included the wonderfully vibrant ‘The Road to York through Stedmere, 1997’ and the striking ‘Garrowby Hill, 1998’.
The 2012 ‘A Bigger Picture’ also includes Hockney’s love of digital artwork, producing a succession of vivid drawings primarily on his beloved IPAD and arranged together as enormous landscapes for the exhibition, as well as a series of multi-screen video installations of the same Yorkshire landscape through the changing seasons. In discussion with the Royal Academy to exhibit the collection of landscapes in January 2011, Hockney suggested the exhibition take place a year later, in January 2012, so the viewer could see the same beautiful countryside through each season, in particular from winter through to spring, and which became a prominent theme for this hugely popular exhibition.
In conversation with Tim Marlow, Hockney explained that he needed to immerse himself fully in the ‘2012 – A Bigger Picture’ collection by stating, “I don’t mind boring others, but I don’t want to bore myself”.
The second half of this insightful and absorbing film explicates the subsequent Hockney exhibition, ‘David Hockney RA: 82 Portraits and 1 Still-Life’ at the Royal Academy in 2016. In stark contrast to the expansive landscape exhibition of 2012, ‘82 Portraits and One Still-Life’ is a singular, more intimate work of art; a series of 82 large-scale, identically sized portraits of Hockney’s friends, family and colleagues, as well as the amusing 1 Still-Life painting of ‘Fruit on a Bench, 2014’ – a nod to Hockney’s irreverent humour perhaps – the portrait collection giving a unique perspective into the people in Hockney’s own life, and how he views them through the subject viewing him, viewing them as he paints. Each sitter was asked to pose in the same, simple chair, firstly drawing each subject in charcoal and then painting each portrait over a period of three days, 20 hours in total.
As Hockney explains, “they are finished, unfinished”.
Having previously collaborated with Hockney on the 2007 Royal Academy of Arts exhibition ‘Bigger Trees Near Water’, the academy’s own Senior Curator Edith Devaney, also beautifully curated both exhibitions featured in the film, even sitting for Hockney for the three allotted days for two portrait paintings, with one of them becoming part of the 82 Portraits displayed in the 2016 exhibition – ‘Edith Devaney – 11, 12, 13th February 2016’ and the last portrait painted for the collection itself.
As Hockney related, “Everybody sits in a very different way, and all I do is turn the chair a bit!”
The vibrancy and complementing colours of each piece are both striking and consuming, but on first glance, there is a uniformity to these portraits, beautifully hung side by side against the deep red of the vast exhibit rooms of the Sackler Wing at the Royal Academy.
This engaging film of Hockney’s journey to produce the magnificent volume of work that both exhibitions displayed is also about his relationships. From Hockney’s heartfelt relationship with his birthplace of Yorkshire, and the landscapes and buildings he grew up in, to his inimitable relationship with art through drawings, photographs, film-making and painting, and also his unique relationships to each of the 82 people in the individual portraits of the 2016 collection.
With a combined total of 750,000 visitors to the Royal Academy, and as one of the most renowned British artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, Hockney was more prolific than ever in his 80th year. Known for his love of working, he asks, “Portraiture, landscape and Still-Life – what else is there?”
Review by Miss Woo
Directed by: Phil Grabsky
Produced by: Seventh Art Productions
Presented by: Tim Marlow
Curated by Edith Devaney for the Royal Academy of Arts, London
Exhibition On Screen’s David Hockney at the Royal Academy of Arts film is available in cinemas nationwide.
