David Hockney: 82 Portraits and One Still-Life

'Cool, funny, opinionated, this engaging volume .. goes far beyond an exhibition catalogue to consider through interviews, essays and scores of images, his six-decade involvement with portraiture' - FT

An informative and engaging book about David Hockney's portraits - the exhibition catalogue from the Royal Academy's 2016 show 

This summer 2016 publication brings together the recent body of work by David Hockney, perhaps the most popular and versatile British artist of the last century. The book which accompanies an exhibition at the Royal Academy looks exclusively at the portraits he has been painting in the last few years – the subjects of which are friends, family and art-world luminaries.

After the sad events that touched his life in 2012, Hockney had stopped painting altogether. His move from Yorkshire to California coincided with his decision to revisit acrylic paints and bold colours. Vibrant, observant and full of life, these portraits mark a return to vivid, Technicolor form. Incisive text from Tim Barringer places these works within Hockney’s development as a portrait painter, while curator Edith Devaney interviews the artist about the series, which he describes as ‘twenty-hour exposures’, in reference to the time each portrait takes to paint. The book shows the stages of each painting, from first to last mark, and gives the reader a unique insight into Hockney’s working method. 

Details

• Authors: Tim Barringer, Paul Mellon professor of the history of art at Yale University and Edith Devaney, Curator of contemporary projects at the Royal Academy of Arts, London
• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Date published: June 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN: 978-1910350287
• Product Dimensions: 28.0 x 20 cm

Reviews

'The rather splendid book that serves as an exhibition catalogue, shows Hockney standing with a montage of all 83 paintings, demonstrating that he wants this series to be regarded as a single body of work. He also believes that "The 20-hour exposure is not only visual. These people are revealed' - The Arts Desk

'Cool, funny, opinionated, this engaging volume .. goes far beyond an exhibition catalogue to consider through interviews, essays and scores of images, his six-decade involvement with portraiture' - FT

'Between the catalogue’s informal, sympathetic interview with Edith Devaney, the academy’s curator, and its long essay by the Yale art historian Tim Barringer (who has written about Hockney a lot and is very generous in his mention of great historic figures such as Ingres and Cézanne), we get a full picture of the processes that went into “82 Portraits”' - The Evening Standard