Dedications: My four late friends Rory, Stan, Bryan, Jeff - shine on you crazy diamonds, they would have blogged too. Then theres Garry from Brisbane, Franco in Milan, Mike now in S.F. / my '60s-'80s gang: Ned & Joseph in Ireland; in England: Frank, Des, Guy, Clive, Joe & Joe, Ian, Ivan, Nick, David, Les, Stewart, the 3 Michaels / Catriona, Sally, Monica, Jean, Ella, Anne, Candie / and now: Daryl in N.Y., Jerry, John, Colin, Martin and Donal.

Sunday, 11 September 2016

Hockney's bigger book

We got a lot of David Hockney's books over the years, starting with that 1978 nice Thames & Hudson retrospective on his career to then (right), followed by his books on paper pools, collages, sketches, his dogs and all those various exhibitions, as his art moved from London to Paris and Europe and on to America and back to the North of England in recent years, as per other posts on him, see label, plus of course that A BIGGER SPLASH film in 1974.. Now 79 Hockney is painting and smoking as much as ever - there will be a huge new exhibition at the Tate in London next year, after the one that just finished here Now we have an even bigger book:

Taschen are bringing out A BIGGER BOOK, and this IS  a coffee table tome, in fact it could be a coffee table, if you have £1,750 for the price, but it does comes with its own stand. It is 500 pages, large size, weighing 70lbs ... covering 60 years of David's ever-changing art from his Bradford art-student days to now, and it is signed by Hockney, could he have signed all 10,000 copies? 
Good interview with him too in this week's "Sunday Times", by Lynn Barber. He is going to paint on for as long as he can, but he does have a good team of 9 to help him: 3 assistants, and other staff (housekeeper, gardener, those off-site running his office and archive). 
A BIGGER BOOK follows his 2012 Royal Academy exhibition, A Bigger Picture, in which the artist produced large images with the aid of an iPad. It unveils at Frankfurt's Book Fair in October, with Hockney present to introduce the new tome. 

1 comment:

  1. I think I will give his bigger book a miss. I have the earlier one and must have another look at it. There is an exhibition of his early drawings on in Belfast at the minute but my friend Martin wasn't impressed so I may give them a miss.

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