David Hockney Pop Art Paintings at Pace Wildenstein
Pop Artist David Hockney’s Landscape Paintings
Five years ago, with his 70th birthday looming and an enormously successful career safely in his pocket, pop artist David Hockney left his long-time Hollywood home to return to England, and the East Yorkshire town of his childhood. And there, David Hockney, much to everyone’s surprise including the artist himself, began what Hockney scholar and friend Lawrence Weschler aptly calls “the fiercest, most joyous, most sustained, and most prolific bout of painting in his entire career, one that shows no sign of abating.” The result of Hockney’s brilliant burst of creativity includes his landscape paintings now on display at one of the great gallery shows of the year, Pace Wildenstein’s two-venue exhibition, David Hockney: Paintings 2006 – 2009.
David Hockney’s Largest Pop Art Paintings On Display
Most of David Hockney’s new pop art paintings and works are huge, poppy, oil-painted landscapes of the countryside around David Hockney’s Yorkshire home. To get around the problem of painting large-scale works out of doors (and in the often grim English weather), the artist created these pieces in sections, bringing just one or two smaller canvases to the site, and assembling them into a vibrant whole later on, in his studio. The largest paintings are at Pace Wildenstein’s 25th Street gallery, and they are pretty astonishing, all swirling and alive and exploding with the brightest purples and greens and oranges. As New York Magazine’s Vulture put it, it’s “like Van Gogh meets Wizard of Oz”.
At the spacious lower level of Pace Wildenstein’s 57th Street location you’ll find about a dozen more new landscape paintings from the same collection of East Yorkshire pieces, equally exuberant and drenched in color. Also here on 57th Street, hanging in the gallery’s upper floor, is a fascinating selection of David Hockney’s recent portrait paintings, of California friends and acquaintances, which he created working with Photoshop and a Wacom. Although perhaps not as newsworthy or dramatic as his new landscape paintings, these portraits are quietly gripping and wonderfully intimate, and definitely worth a trip to midtown.
David Hockney: Paintings 2006 – 2009 at Pace Wildenstein details
David Hockney: Paintings 2006 – 2009–his first exhibition of new paintings in New York City in more than 12 years–is on view from now until December 24 at the Pace Wildenstein gallery at 534 West 25th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues) and at the Pace at 32 East 57th Street (between Madison and Park Avenues). Both galleries are open from Tuesday through Saturday, from 10:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m. For more information, go to the Pace website here. For a great slideshow of the work, see the New York Magazine Vulture post, here.
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