David Hockney (born 1937) is one of the most popular and widely recognised artists of our time. After first coming to public attention in 1962, while still a student at the Royal College of Art, he went on to produce some of the best-known painting of the 1960s.
I personally went in the last few days. At 10 o'clock when I arrived at the gallery there were hundreds of people on the stairs, at every entrance, ready to pop inside at any moment. I knew there was a very limited amount of tickets left for sale at the ticket shop, but I really wanted to see the exhibition. I knew about it since the begging of the year but never got the chance, I couldn't miss it this time. I didn't even know where they sold tickets and when I arrived there were already at least 100 people in front of me waiting in line. They were selling fast, but I got one from 4 p.m.
I came back at 4 p.m pretty excited to "meet" David Hockney in "person". It was like a lesson of history, travelling back in time, from the beginning of Hockney's journey, while he was still a student. It was the first opportunity to see this early painting alongside with work in a variety of media.The work spans from 1960s through 2013. The exhibition is arranged chronologically except for the first room, where there were mixed from different periods.
In total there were 12 rooms, extremely different from each other in style, theme, technique, colours, mediums. You could really see him experimenting, and trying very different techniques from panting, drawing and sketching with liners or charcoal, photography, collage, video, video installation, iPad drawing, iPhone drawings. Hockney's work questions the conventions of picture-making and he's very versatile. I was very pleasantly surprised by the different art works.
He could do both very clean surfaces with no details, and at the same time you would see extremely detailed and carefully done areas, you could see patience and precision, also a greater kind of knowledge and understating of things. He would have in one room very vivid colours, and right before it only tones of brown, then very detailed portraits in thin black liner, then collages made from Polaroid photographs or video installation. Amazing, I loved it!
There were a lot of people, old and young, tall and short, and even though we would enter a group every hour it was still difficult to move around and see the art works in some rooms. Going through all the rooms took me two hours, it didn't seem like it, and at the end I felt my head heavy with information. It was an inspiration and a great exhibition.
Info: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/david-hockney
More, and artwork from the exhibiton: https://www.instagram.com/david.hockney/