FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Hockney in Normandy

Feb 22 – Mar 19, 2021

Gray New York
1018 Madison Ave, New York

NEW YORK - Gray is pleased to present Hockney in Normandy, a solo exhibition featuring David Hockney’s recent iPad paintings and landscape prints created at his home and studio in Normandy, France. Hockney in Normandy is open by appointment for in-person or virtual viewings from February 22 through March 19, 2021 at Gray New York.

For the preeminent British artist’s eleventh solo exhibition at Gray, Hockney captures the intimate interior spaces of his Normandy home and its scenic surroundings. Highlighting his singular sense of line and longstanding commitment to exploring perspective through technology, Hockney’s iPad paintings can be traced back to his early experiments with photographic media which began in the 1980s when the artist created a body of panoramic Polaroid photocollages. His exploration of technological media continued with Xerox and fax machines, Macintosh computers, and, upon their release in the late 2000s, the iPhone and iPad. Drawing and painting on touchscreens since 2009, Hockney remains a prolific draftsman, sustaining a routine of daily drawing which often turns his gaze toward intimate views of everyday life. As Hockney notes, “On an iPad you draw a bit differently, but that’s all you do. Drawing is 50,000 years old, isn’t it? I think it comes from very deep within us actually.”(i)

Hockney’s prints and iPad paintings from Normandy also highlight the artist’s enduring ritual of witnessing the arrival of spring, a practice he has maintained throughout his years in Los Angeles, California, and Yorkshire, England. In 2019, while familiarizing himself with the surroundings of his studio in Normandy—a seventeenth-century building with thick timber, red shingles, a reflecting pond, and plenty of blooming brush—Hockney set out with ink and concertina sketchbooks which would result in a series of works on paper depicting the idyllic countryside that surrounded him. Drawing the viewer into an amble through his gardens, Hockney in Normandy presents the suite of prints produced from those paintings on paper. Always insisting on experiencing landscape rather than simply viewing it, Hockney reminds his viewers, “We do not look at the world from a distance; we are in it, and that’s how we feel… I tend to like the thought that I’m in the world. I don’t want just to look through keyholes.“(ii)

Hockney in Normandy will be on view at Gray New York by appointment, Monday through Friday, 11AM - 5PM, from February 22 until March 19, 2021. To explore the exhibition online, visit Gray Viewing Rooms.

To explore the online viewing room, click here.

ARTIST BIO

David Hockney (British, b. 1937) has produced some of the most vividly recognizable and influential works of the twentieth century. Hockney gained notoriety in his mid-twenties, after receiving the Gold Medal from London’s Royal College of Art, and he quickly became one of the defining figures of the British Pop Art movement.

In the late 1960s, Hockney relocated to California and established himself as a prolific figurative and landscape artist. He is perhaps best recognized for the works he produced there: brightly colored, large-scale evocative images of the Southern California lifestyle, and domestic, intimate portraits of his friends, family, and lovers. Hockney’s works are notable for their quietness of subject, flatness of space, and subtle reduction of form. Hockney has received a vast number of awards and honors, including in 1997 his recognition as a Companion of Honour from the British and Commonwealth Order for his outstanding achievement in the arts.

David Hockney’s work can be found in numerous distinguished public collections around the world, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the Art Institute of Chicago; the National Portrait Gallery, London; The Tate Gallery, London; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo.

For press inquiries, please contact Rebecca Daniel, 312.642.8877, rdm@richardgraygallery.com.