David HockneyLooking At Woldgate Woods

The Arts Club of Chicago is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition David Hockney: “Looking At Woldgate Woods” on Friday 25 April 2008. The ten works in The Arts Club exhibition mark Hockney’s rigorous return to oil painting. They depict the same view of the woods where three paths converge at different times of day throughout the year. Hockney developed a method of working on multiple panels that can be easily transported to the site and later combined to create large-scale works. Nine of these paintings (72 x 144″) were created en plein air and are composed of six smaller canvases (36 x 48″ each). Also included is a single smaller canvas (36 x 48″) painted from memory. Exemplary of his lifelong commitment to attentive and careful looking, the series captures the experience of being in the space, affected by changing light, shadow and color. Informed by fresh observation, the Woldgate Woods paintings are a continuation of Hockney’s lifelong search for expressions of vision in all of its psychological complexity.

Hockney is an influential and prolific English artist who has worked as a painter, printmaker, photographer, draftsman, and operatic stage designer. Hockney was born in 1937 in Bradford and attended the Bradford School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London. After numerous visits and teaching positions in the United States, he settled in Los Angeles in 1978. Hockney’s work has been marked by intensive stylistic variation and experimentation with media and techniques. Some of his best known works are the California pool paintings and large-scale double portraits of the 1960s, composite Polaroids, photographic collages and neo-Cubist experiments of the 1980s, pencil portraits drawn with the aid of a camera lucida of the late 1990s, and stage designs for operas. Hockney’s interest in technology and methods led him to investigate the use of optical devices by the Old Masters in their mastery of realism, the results of which he published in Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (Viking Studio, 2001). A catalogue is available with an essay by Lawrence Weschler, concurrently artistic director of the Chicago Humanities Festival and director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University. Weschler’s collected writings on Hockney, which span over twenty years, are forthcoming this fall under the title True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney (University of California Press, 2008).