David Hockney known for bold colors and landscapes, has long been interested in the technology of art and using new media to make art. He wrote a book about evidence that the old masters used devices liked a camera lucida. He has used Polaroid film, color photocopiers and fax machines, and in 2009, began sending friends daily drawings of flower bouquets made on his iPhone.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo Pace Gallery Archive
The exhibition “The Yosemite Suite” at Pace Gallery in New York present a group of works Hockney made on the iPad during visits to Yosemite National Park in 2010 and 2011 and highlight the artist’s continuing engagement with the landscape, particularly that of the American West. Always interested in the possibilities presented by new technologies, Hockney took the iPad to Yosemite and used it to draw the landscape in situ as he experienced it. The compactness of the device allowed him to work in an immediate and impromptu manner. During the 2010 trip, Hockney created over 20 drawings, which he titled “The Yosemite Suite”. Recognizing that the drawings done on the iPad could be produced as large prints, Hockney calibrated each gesture and color accordingly, carefully transposing the scale from screen to print. In 2011, Hockney began experimenting with larger prints of his iPad drawings. Similar to his multi-panel landscape paintings, these large-scale images of the Yosemite Valley are printed on four panels and solve the problem of capturing the vastness of Yosemite in a single image. Art critics have shown mixed reactions to Mr. Hockney’s use of technology like the iPad. “They can never hide their electronic origins, no matter how painterly they appear. There’s something inescapably dead and bland and gutless about them. Openness to technical innovation is one thing, art another” wrote Adrian Searle in The Guardian. But in The New York Times, Roberta Smith wrote, “This array forms an in-depth portrait of the artist as a tradition-fluent progressive working nonstop at the height of his powers, deftly juggling digital and analog modes of representation and energetically pursuing newness on several fronts”. With “The Yosemite Suite”, Hockney joins a host of artists who have been captivated by the park’s allure since its founding in 1890. Before Ansel Adams’s lens, the painter Albert Bierstadt’s dramatic landscapes gained important early publicity for Yosemite, and drew the first crowds from around the United States in the late 19th Century.
Info: Pace Gallery, 537 West 24th Street, New York, Duration: 29/4-18/6/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.pacegallery.com