LONDON (Jun 4, 1996 08:53 a.m. EDT) -- After faxes and photocopiers, Britain's most celebrated living artist, David Hockney, has been inspired by the latest inkjet printing technology to produce a radical new body of work.
Hockney, 59, an artist who has always seen technology as just another tool of expression, has created photographs that do not look like photographs.
Like his heroes Picasso and Matisse, Hockney can never resist experimenting and innovating: inkjet technology, he discovered, offered a palette of kaleidoscopic colours with an incomparable radiance and detail that blur the boundaries between photographs, paintings and our perception of them. Hockney has never considered his activities as distinct from one another and inkjet printing -- which involves dye being sprayed with extreme accuracy at a surface at a rate of 4 million 15 micron droplets per second -- further narrows the divide between them.
The works, to be unveiled this week at Salts Mill in Saltaire, near his home town of Bradford, mark an important departure from his earlier experiments with both paintings and photography.
These are mesmerising images that explore illusion and space and bewilder the eye. Titles such as "Photograph of a Photograph with Photograph of a Painting with Motif" tease the viewer into playing spatial games: photographs of photographs of his paintings juxtaposed with the actual paintings and interiors featuring people looking at the paintings. A canvas on an easel is juxtaposed with the actual still-life it represents and a photographic detail of one of his other paintings.
In one, called "Photography is dead. Long live painting," Hockney's painting of a vase of sunflowers is photographed next to the actual objects: playing with reality and perspective, he has painted the lower part of the vase on to another piece of paper lying on the table, but photographed so that it appears to be standing next to the real thing.
Taking the idea a step further, Hockney suggested siting a huge jardiniere of sunflowers in the gallery.
Sunday afternoon (June 2), commenting on the ideas he was conveying through the "Photography is dead" title, Hockney said: 'Photography is being altered by drawing because of the computer -- i.e. moving back to painting.'
He said his latest works were made with a 10 by 8 camera with natural light and varying exposure times on a colour transparency film. They were printed with an inkjet printer on heavyweight, textured paper.
He said: 'How long the colour will last is not known, but has been thought about by the craftsmen involved in the process. It seems to me to be the most beautiful printing of photography I have seen. The colour on the paper seems almost physical. The surface of the paper itself is beautiful.' He added: 'Enjoy the moment. The piece of paper is beautiful. It will slowly change like everything else.'
Hockney first dabbled in photography in 1982, with his Cubist-inspired Polaroid collage. Before that, ironically, he had scorned the camera as 'nothing more than a recording device,' useful as preliminary studies for paintings. 'You'd never look at a photo for more than 30 seconds unless there were a thousand faces and you were looking for your mother,' he once said.
He was soon seeing the artistic possibilities of photography, creating multiple viewpoints and complex narratives: his camera art, experimental and spontaneous in technique, has become a major part of his career. The images go on show at the 1853 Gallery, Salts Mill, a sprawling Grade II listed Victorian mill run by a local businessman Jonathan Silver, 46, who was educated at the same school as Hockney, but became friendly with the artist when he was a 13-year-old schoolboy and Hockney was being noticed at the Royal College of Art. Mr. Silver rents out part of the building for commercial use: the rest is given over to Hockney. About 300 works, some owned by Mr. Silver or on loan from the artist, are on view, attracting 10,000 visitors a week. Mr. Silver said of the latest works: 'They are remarkable. He's taken technology and humanised it in his own way.' The exhibition catalogue observes: 'He has taken two useful but humble functions of the photograph -- the function of recording works of art and the function of the exhibition installaion shot -- and transformed them. Because the paintings and the exhibition photographed are his own, Hockney has been able to play games with the subject-matter ... In this way, the photographs transcend their role as artifacts, records or simple examples of the medium of photography. They become works of imagination.'