PaceWildenstein is honored to present a two-venue exhibition at 32 East 57th Street
and 534 West 25th Street on the occasion of David Hockney’s first exhibition of new paintings in New York in over 12 years. The show features recent landscape paintings of the artist’s native Yorkshire, including 14 new works that have never before been exhibited, as well as 14 which travel to the gallery from a major museum exhibition at the Kunsthalle Würth in Schwäbisch Hall, Germany. A catalogue with an essay by Lawrence Weschler, Director of the New York Institute of the Humanities at New York University, and the author of True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney (University of California Press, 2008), will accompany the exhibition. David Hockney:

Recent Paintings will open at 32 East 57th Street on October 23 and at 534 West 25th Street on October 29, and will be on view through December 24, 2009. The public is invited to attend an opening reception on Thursday, October 29 from 6-8 p.m. at 534 West 25th Street.

The British artist David Hockney has produced some of the most vividly recognizable images of this century. His ambitious pursuits stretch across a vast range of media, from photographic collages to full-scale opera stagings and from fax drawings to an intensive art historical study of the optical devices of Old Masters. Now largely working in East Yorkshire, he has rediscovered the vivid landscape of his youth and has become engaged in what Weschler calls “the fiercest, most joyous, most sustained, and most prolific bout of painting of his entire career, one that shows no sign of abating.” Hockney set up his easel en plein air for his first new oil painting of the countryside surrounding Bridlington in 2005.

He began working on relatively small canvases, producing three to four a day, painting into the fall and the early winter; “It’s only having seen a tree’s inner structure, with its branches laid bare in winter,” Hockney explains, that one “learns to experience, and then to render, that tree’s subsequent summer fullness—and then vice versa.” Indeed, “[i]f famously seasonless Los Angeles had taught Hockney space and spaciousness,” Weschler writes, “the East Yorkshire countryside was now teaching him time, and with his dazzlingly colorful renderings, he in turn was making its passage central to the depiction of paysage. More to the point, though, it was as if, after over twenty years of myriad wanderings, he’d found a figurative (non-abstract) way clean past the monocular optical vise.” Hockney devised a method for painting large-scale
canvases outdoors and the need to overcome wind, rain and snow, and logistics of viewing the scene as well as transportation of the canvases. He divided the full expanse of a painting among several canvases, and each morning transported a few of the canvases to the field, mounting one or more at a time onto easels.

Returning to his studio at the end of the day, Hockney combined the parts to form the whole image, resulting in large-scale multi-canvas paintings such as Bigger Trees Nearer Warter, captured in the winter and summer of 2008, on view in the 25th Street gallery, and The Big
Hawthorne (2008) at 57th Street, each composed of nine canvases and measuring 108 x 144".
Each year since his return to Yorkshire, Hockney anticipates the brief blooming of the Hawthorne blossoms—which lasts only three or four days—through late May and all of June; “[T]here are just a few weeks each spring and fall where everything starts happening very fast, and you have to work very fast if you’re going to see,” Hockney paraphrases Cezanne, “because everything is fast disappearing.” Once it begins, he is prepared. The artist uses his prime hours outdoors to capture the scene before him in charcoal, and then takes the drawings back to his studio to create the basis for new paintings, like those on view in this exhibition. “So much of seeing is memory, which is yet another aspect of the human
reality of vision that ordinary photographs can’t even begin to capture,” the artist explains. The twenty-eight paintings featured also include Hockney’s felled trees and “totems,” narrating the once in a generation thinning of the forest and the lumber that it produces. “Suffolk had its Constable, and West Yorkshire its Turner,” Weschler writes, “But before Hockney, nobody had ever really bothered to look at East Yorkshire like this, with this passion and this savor. Or at any rate to portray it thus imbued.”