David Hockney - Moving Focus - Hardcover

by Helen Little (Author)

A unique overview of David Hockney's prolific range and activity

David Hockney has been delighting and challenging audiences for sixty years and celebrated artworks from across his career are at the centre of Tate's outstanding collection. This book features over a hundred of these paintings, prints, drawings and photographs, helping the reader to understand the artist's changing sources of inspiration and, crucially, where his work is going. Beginning in the 1950s when he made his first steps to becoming a modern artist, the publication charts Hockney's ground-breaking images of the early 1960s through to his famous depictions of the Los Angeles cityscape. It also looks at Hockney's much-loved portraits from the 1970s and his discovery of a new way of dealing with time, space and perspective he called 'Moving Focus', as well as more recent landscapes and digital images that demonstrate his lifelong preoccupation with pictorial space and how we look at and experience the world around us.

As well as providing a unique overview of Hockney's prolific range and activity, this book features new texts and responses to his work by established and emerging voices from the worlds of art, design, literature and performance. Breathing new life into the nexus of Tate's collection, it speaks to the artist's refusal to conform during periods of uncertainty and polarization as he traversed the boundaries of class, sexuality and high art and how his work still surprises, unsettles and addresses younger generations of viewers.

Author Biography

Helen Little is an independent curator and researcher with a special interest in twentieth-century and contemporary British art, architecture and design. She was previously Assistant Curator, Modern and Contemporary British art at Tate Britain, London where she specialized in British art from 1945 and realized major exhibitions and displays from this period.