David Hockney was considered to be one of the most influential and recognizable artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
He worked across painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, and digital media. 140 of those works are now on view in Tampa.
WUSF's Cathy Carter has a look at the show called "David Hockney: Perspective Should Be Reversed" with museum curator Joanna Robotham.
The interview below was edited for clarity and brevity.
Joanna, the artist once said, "You need three things for painting: the hand, the eye, and the heart.”
I love that quote. As a young boy, he started off cartooning. He loved to doodle. You know, I think that idea of drawing what you see was what his entire practice became about. When you look at his work, he's not just painting objects that are just kind of random. Everything is done with intent, and so the subjects in his paintings are his friends and family, the people that he loves.
In the same regards to the landscapes that you'll see, this is his home environment. In every work that you see in the show, it's truly painting with his heart, and he's painting with his eyes, and using his hands to create that work.
And these works on view reflect Hockney's career-long exploration into new ways of thinking about art. He used Fax machines and iPads. Can you tell us a little bit about this embrace of technology?
Absolutely. I think just from the very kind of early days of art, everything about art is about innovation and pushing the boundaries and how we see the world. And Hockney felt like once he mastered an area, he moved on and tried to challenge himself again. And I think, in a way, as someone who grew up between the wars and saw the advancement of technology in the 20th century, it completely makes sense that he would pick up things like using the camera not just to take pictures, but using those pictures to make art, using a copier machine to make prints.
And what he loved about technology was that it gave him the speed to create art. It gave him an instant gratification, and he could produce more and more work and satisfy that urge to make art, and then really embracing the iPad and going back to that wonderful urge to draw and using his fingertips as brushes.
You spoke earlier about how he painted his friends and things he knew. He did have that rare ability to completely alter how ordinary people observe their daily surroundings. Can you speak to that a little bit?
Yes. So, one of the sections in the exhibition it's called, I think, "Ordinary Objects, Extraordinary Renderings,” where you can see him looking at things like an ashtray or a vase of lilies, to just the interior of his home. He found beauty in everything that he saw. Beauty can come in any object at any moment.
And David Hockney was revolutionary. He came out at the age of 23. This was the year 1960. That was a full seven years before the UK partially decriminalized homosexuality. So rather than hiding his sexuality, he made it a central theme of his art at a time when he was technically broadcasting a criminal act.
That's one of the threads of the exhibition that I really hope that people pick up on. There are two bodies of work that I feel are very important to this show. One of them is ‘A Rake's Progress' that he created in 1967. He created a semi-autobiographical portfolio that detailed a young gay man who had just arrived in New York City in the 1960s and felt quite liberated to be in a major city where he could just be who he was and not feel embarrassed or ashamed or had to hide anything. He just went for it.
Joanna, David Hockney did pass away just a few months ago, in June. He was 88 years old. There were so many tributes to him. How will you remember David Hockney?
It's funny, in looking at the artwork on view in this show, it doesn't really feel like David Hockney has really left us because there's such life in his work. He found beauty in everything that he saw, and I think that's very difficult today when we have so many images inundating us — to look at somebody who is creating something with just his full heart is something that I think I will truly take away from the show, and I hope our audience does as well.
David Hockney: Perspective Should Be Reversed is on view at the Tampa Museum of Art through Feb. 28, 2027.
