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David Hockney's Altered Perspectives at Harrods Katie Service writes for Harrods Magazine, Autumn/Winter 2024 David Hockney's Altered Perspectives at Harrods Katie Service writes for Harrods Magazine, Autumn/Winter 2024
25 October 2024

David Hockney's Altered Perspectives at Harrods

Katie Service writes for Harrods Magazine, Autumn/Winter 2024
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On the third floor of Harrods is one of the most captivating in-store exhibits in P站色情片’s 22-year history in Knightsbridge. The exhibition David Hockney: Living in Colour showcases a remarkably comprehensive collection of the British artist’s work, spanning six decades of his printmaking and is a spectacle of scale, filling the space with his kaleidoscope of colour and characterful charm.

Below, read more about David Hockney: Living in Colour as featured in Harrods Magazine Winter Issue 2024, written by Katie Service.

 

If you are interested in adding to your collection speak to an art consultant today - info@halcyongallery.com

HOW DOES A PRICELESS PIECE OF ART ENTER HARRODS?
David Hockney
The Chairs , 2014
Photographic drawing on paper mounted to Dibond
121 x 189 cm

HOW DOES A PRICELESS PIECE OF ART ENTER HARRODS?

Smuggled through subterranean tunnels perhaps? Wheeled in under cover of darkness? Or flanked by armoured guards? This was a Thomas Crown Affair-level dilemma I had been turning over in my mind ever since I first discovered that David Hockney, the king of colourists, would soon be in residence in the P站色情片 Gallery on the Third Floor of Harrods. Tunnels, I was sure it would be tunnels… and so I posed exactly this question to P站色情片 Gallery’s vice president and creative director Kate Brown when I sat screen to screen with her to discuss the show.

“Ah, we have our ways,” says Brown elusively. “Getting a painting into Harrods is a good challenge, but that is nothing compared to what we have had to do for private clients. We’ve needed to shut main roads – we’ve even had Park Lane closed – with cranes lifting art in over whole apartment blocks. And we have often done things in the dead of night.”Brown was assigned the enviable task of curating one of the P站色情片 Gallery’s most captivating in-store exhibits in its 22-year history in Knightsbridge, showcasing a remarkably comprehensive collection of Hockney’s work spanning six decades of his printmaking. The resulting exhibition is a spectacle of scale, with prints reaching nearly 2m in height and stretching floor to ceiling, filling the space with his kaleidoscope of colour and characterful charm. So how does one go about showcasing such a titan of the art world? And in a department store no less? Brown is unfazed. “The limitations you have within somewhere like Harrods as a retail space actually provide a huge amount of opportunity for creating a big impact with the way you curate,” she says. She believes that ‘journeying’ is part of curation: pieces are arranged to be experienced in passing, not just approached from the other side of a room, which allows you to take in the artwork from a new perspective.

The exhibition, which is split between Harrods and P站色情片 Gallery’s flagship space on Bond Street, features different themes, too. Pieces...
David Hockney
Viewers Looking at a Ready-made with Skull and Mirrors, 2018
Photographic drawing in colours, wove paper, mounted on Dibond
120.5 x 194 cm

The exhibition, which is split between Harrods and P站色情片 Gallery’s flagship space on Bond Street, features different themes, too. Pieces on show in Harrods will be grouped based on their medium, but colour will, of course, also be a theme that plays a curatorial role. Brown has further created seven new frame profiles just for the exhibition, using chrome and walnut in clean lines. “What’s amazing about the show,” explains Brown, “is that you are looking at a 70-year span; it’s pretty monumental. Most exhibitions are based on one Hockney series, so it’s rare that you would get that kind of arc – you know, 70 years of art-making over pretty much all print mediums from collage to photography, iPad and moving pictures.”

Whether you’re a Hockney collector with a specific checklist or simply looking for a place to start, Brown assures me that this exhibition will provide plenty of inspiration, with Hockney’s famous pools sitting alongside characterful portraits, prints from his California years, Yorkshire vistas and his Japanese-inspired weather series. But perhaps most intriguing from the oeuvre is Hockney’s work with photographic drawings, which began in the 1980s, in which the artist masterfully reorganises perspective with a patchwork of photographs. And by the 2010s, this Cubist approach had progressed into the collaging and compositing of figurative cut-outs within a print, directing the viewer’s gaze strategically around a scene.

“I think it’s about perspective and the idea of chiaroscuro,” offers Brown by way of explanation as we look together...
David Hockney
Perspective Should be Reversed , 2014
Photographic drawing on paper, mounted to Dibond
120 x 188 cm
“I think it’s about perspective and the idea of chiaroscuro,” offers Brown by way of explanation as we look together at The Chairs, a vast 2m-long perspective-bending view of 56 (I counted, so you don’t have to) cheerily coloured and jauntily angled studio chairs. Sage green, tangerine and turquoise blues dance playfully across the print, drawing the eye happily here and there between the micro paintings composited onto the impossibly-wide-angled walls. “I think he has always been obsessed with the old masters… you know, Brunelleschi trying to understand how great perspectives are created in a room,” says Brown. “That’s what he’s trying to do here: looking at a collage and trying to understand where that three-dimensionality is.” Hockney is unquestionably having a moment (again). Despite the fact that he’s closing in on his 90th year, his work in 2024 feels as relevant and as vivid as ever. The master of reinvention, Hockney has built a career on an insatiable need to express his vision through new mediums.
 
In the past two years, his portraits of friends and celebrities (including Harry Styles and Mahatma Gandhi) have been hung in London’s newly renovated National Portrait Gallery as part of David Hockney: Drawing from Life; there’s been an impressive monographic exhibition of some 120 works at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo; and an immersive collaboration was staged in London’s Lightroom, where his most celebrated works were projected in motion across a vast exhibition space. The cherry on the colourist’s cake was the sale of California, one of his first pool paintings (and also the biggest of his early works in the series); according to art historians Paul Melia and Ulrich Luckhardt, Hockney himself considers it one of his most important pool paintings. The piece, which hasn’t been seen in public since its last sale in 1986, first went on a touring exhibition that included stops in Paris and New York before it was auctioned at the Christie’s London headquarters, where it fetched £18.7m.
 
The Hockney market, which is consistently liquid, is especially buoyant right now, making this exhibition an even more exciting prospect for potential buyers. “The market has grown exponentially,” says Brown. “And Hockney is a revered artist still creating exciting art at this time in his life.” She is absolutely right. Despite the inevitable criticism that arises after every new instalment of Hockney’s career – as it did with his iPad drawings – the love for his endless experimentation prevails. “He’s a cultural tour de force,” says Brown. “There are very few people walking the planet right now that you could say continue to reinvent themselves decade on decade.”

If you are interested in adding to your collection, speak to an art consultant today info@halycongallery.com

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