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Hockney's Eye - Exhibition catalogue

Hockney's Eye - Exhibition catalogue

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Hockney's Eye: The Art and Technology of Depiction

One of the most influential artists of our time, David Hockney (b.1937) takes over Cambridge this spring and summer with an exhibition across The Fitzwilliam Museum and The Heong Gallery, Downing College.

This beautifully illustrated catalogue has been published to accompany this major new show, contextualising the artist's work alongside other masters from the history of western art. 

In The Fitzwilliam Museum’s picture galleries, Hockney’s drawings, paintings and digital artworks are shown in a series of provocative encounters with works by artists including Vincent Van Gogh, Claude Monet, John Constable and Andy Warhol.

The display at The Heong Gallery charts Hockney's pioneering modern experiments in bringing hand, eye, and optical instruments together from the 1960s to the present day, with the iconic Grand Canyon I (2017) among the many celebrated works on display.

Product details: 

  • Hardback exhibition catalogue
  • ISBN: 9781913645120
  • Publication date: 7th March 2022
  • 24 x 28 cm, 184 pages
  • Printed in the UK

For more products from the exhibition, view the page here: Hockney's Eye Collection

About Hockney's Eye

David Hockney is one of the most celebrated living artists, of the twentieth and twenty first centuries. Throughout his long career, he has insistently explored diverse ways of depicting the visible world. He has scrutinised the methods of the old masters, and explored radical departures from their cherished assumptions.

The Hockney's Eye exhibitions at the Fitzwilliam Museum and Heong Gallery were the first to focus on this central theme in his art.

'Western art' from the Renaissance until at least the late 19th century has been dominated by the depiction of nature. Was this to be accomplished by direct looking (called "eyeballing" by Hockney) or with the assistance of optical theory and devices, such as cameras? Hockney has experimented with the full range of existing strategies, overtly using perspective in some of his classic pictures and rigorously investigating optical aids for the imitation of nature, including the camera obscura and camera lucida.

Yet Hockney has come to reject the photograph as the definitive image of what we see. Along the way, he has identified a 'camera culture' in European painting from 1400, arguing very controversially that the supreme naturalism of painters like Jan van Eyck are the product of optical devices.

His book, Secret Knowledge (2001), with its majestic panorama of paintings over the course of five centuries, claims that art historians have missed the central aspect of painters' practice. The 'Hockney thesis' has been received more favourably outside the professional world of art history than in it. His own artistic practice has been in vigorous dialogue with his radical thesis, and he has progressively demonstrated new and dynamic ways of characterising the visual world without perspective and other conventional techniques.

This quest results a series of joyous challenges to our ways of seeing in the major exhibition in Cambridge at the Fitzwilliam Museum and in the Heong Gallery (Downing College). It will look at the whole span of Hockney's varied career and at the nature of the optical devices he has tested. His vision will be explored in the setting of traditional masterpieces of naturalistic observation, and in the context of modern sciences and technologies of seeing.

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