workedover.ca

During my visit to NYC, I took time out to visit the Chelsea Gallery District. Of all the shows I took in, the most interesting was David Hockney’s Exhibit at Pace Wildenstein.  In this exhibit he presents a body of work of large rural landscapes, using non local colour on a mural scale.  The canvases, like his photographs are individual square segments merged together to make the whole.  The paintings are his trademark pictures of loosely painted images layered on top of each and very flat.  The only sense of depth is created through overlapping and relationships of scale.  There is little sense of depth created through colour tempurature and and atmospheric perspective.  However, there are about three massive paintings that stand out more than the others.  They come across as a new and refreshing direction for the artist.  They have more depth and an almost surreal sense of representation (there are strange multiple vanishing points). The colour relationships and the tensions they create are captivating and have the ability, for such large pictures, to draw you in.  So much so, that you become part of the painting.  I think the works shown above are some of the best by the artist I have seen in a long time.  I look forward to seeing more.  View work at Pace Wildenstein here.