David Hockney at Kunstmuseum Luzern

David Hockney (*1937, UK) is one of the world’s most influential living artists. He rose to fame during the 1960s for his carefree images of Los Angeles and during the following decade for his life-size double portraits. The first comprehensive exhibition of Hockney’s work in Switzerland brings together more than 120 of the artist’s paintings, drawings, prints, and digital works dating from 1954 to today. Charting his early days as a student in London to his latest iPad drawings, it reveals Hockney’s delight in artistic experimentation and lifelong obsession with perspective.

Comprised chiefly from Tate’s collection, the exhibition also features a number of important loans from public and private collections in Europe and beyond. At the heart of the exhibition are two monumental landscape paintings. The first, Hockney’s largest painting to date, measuring four and a half by twelve meters, shows a view of the artist’s native Yorkshire shortly before the onset of spring. The second, a multipart landscape of a magical forest, cordially welcomes viewers with colorful leaves and vines. This bold and cheerful depiction anticipates Hockney's later iPad drawings that appear in the exhibition as a sequence of video animations.

Also on show are Hockney’s iconic pool paintings, his painted and drawn portraits of friends and family, including the celebrated, and two important suites of early etchings inspired by William Hogarth. As the exhibition reveals, Hockney’s focus is constantly moving as he repeatedly tries out new styles to challenge our visual habits.

Taking up the mantle of Pablo Picasso and other cubist models of picture making, a body of Hockney’s work from the 1980s tackles the problem of how to depict our world of time, movement, and space on a flat surface. In a more recent series of works, including a panorama of the artist standing among old and new paintings in his studio, Hockney explores the multiple realities of three-dimensional space to dizzying new heights.

The exhibition is curated by Fanni Fetzer and Helen Little.