For the first time in London, Hockney’s monumental digital frieze, created in Normandy on an iPad during the suspended months of 2020—when the world slowed and looking became more attentive—comes into view. Drawing on the narrative cadence of the Bayeux Tapestry, Hockney turns landscape into thought, colour into lived time. In dialogue with Kensington Gardens, the exhibition marks the artist’s debut at Serpentine.
The conversations presented here are drawn from more than twenty years of dialogue between David Hockney and Hans Ulrich Obrist—a continuous exchange that has evolved over time, shifting in rhythm alongside their lives. The Hockney Interviews is not merely a collection of words, but a shared journey shaped by in-person encounters, spontaneous phone calls, returns, and unexpected detours. Hockney’s studios become waypoints on a deeply personal map: Bridlington on the East Yorkshire coast, London, Los Angeles, and the lumi- nous calm of Normandy. Obrist first visits the studio in South Kensington, then travels north to Bridlington; later come the Californian meetings and long-distance conversations. Each place leaves its trace. Hockney never belongs to a single location: he uses geography as material, transforming landscapes, climates, and daily habits into visions. A painter by vocation, he moves effortlessly across languages with tireless curiosity. When the two first meet, Hockney begins to reflect on the potential of technology as a creative tool. Alongside painting coexist filmmaking, writing, and digital drawing on iPhone and iPad. What binds these conversations together is his remarkable ability to move through time—to let past, present, and future speak within a single thought— interweaving memories, insights, and perspectives that have shaped, day after day, his way of seeing and making art.
David Hockney in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist
August 2008.
Hockney’s studio, Yorkshire, England
Let’s start by talking about these new paintings, which are sitting here in your studio.
David Some of them are for an exhibition in Germany, but the studio here contains a lot of paintings from the past three years, a period of my life that’s been spent mostly here in East Yorkshire. I started painting landscapes because I wanted to depict the three-dimensional world. East Yorkshire is the perfect place to do that because I know the area; I worked on farms here when I was a teenager at school. Most people leave us alone up here and I can get on with actually looking at things. It’s got a gentle rolling landscape, chalk hills and it’s very quiet. Being an agricultural area, the surface of the earth changes colour a lot, unlike a pastoral place. And because we’re on the east coast, we get terrific shadows: a lot of these drawings are done very early in the morning or in the evening, when the sun is quite low.
So you’ve been drawing already this morning?
David No, not this morning because it was a bit cloudy, but we’re often out drawing at six in the morning to catch the light. It’s such a nice thing to do: you know, we’re three-dimensional creatures and we live in a three-dimensional world, unlike cyberspace, which is not three-dimensional. I’ve tended to think that the camera can’t deal with landscape very well because a camera doesn’t really see space—it sees surfaces. Human beings see space, and landscapes such as the Grand Canyon have always been a spatial thrill to me.
“We’re three-dimensional creatures and we live in a three-dimensional world, unlike cyberspace, which is not three-dimensional. I’ve tended to think that the camera can’t deal with landscape very well because a camera doesn’t really see space—it sees surfaces.”
Am I right in saying that the idea of painting Yorkshire came right after you completed the Grand Canyon paintings in the late 1990s? Both being huge empty spaces, I was wondering if there’s a link?
David There is, but I think it’s all part of a much bigger link in my work. It came to me when I was invited to the launch of Adobe Photoshop in Silicon Valley in about 1989. During the demonstration, I could see that it was drawing, really drawing, and that in front of my eyes this was signalling the end of chemical photography—although it’s only recently that Kodak has stopped making the fixative that was the formula of Sir John Herschel (1792– 1871) in 1839.
You’re basically correcting art history, something that’s clearly going to provoke reactions.
David Well, I think that art history has ignored an aspect of art that today has become deeply significant. I’ve realised that the optical projection of nature, which is basically what a photograph is, is much, much older than the chemical invention. 1839 was merely when the chemical invention was made, the fixing of the image. The image had been seen long, long before that. And if you make them yourself, you realise that they look like paintings. People had to have seen these, and then you realise that nobody has ever talked about this. The power of the Church, which was enormous at one time and had huge social control, was when there were only mirrors and lenses to make pictures. Historically you can see its power begin to decline when cameras are widely manufactured after 1839. And as its power slowly declines, the continuum follows the mirror and lenses, which then get into the hands of what we now call the media, who’ve had that control ever since. But it’s just about to break up again in a totally new way, of which, frankly, we don’t know what the implications are going to be. What’s happening is that even more cameras are being manufactured; they’re now in every telephone, so not only can I take a picture, I can now de- liver it to many people. In the past, the picture was delivered by a small group, the media, to the masses, but that group has now spread to everybody.
[..]
Sunday 11 March 2018.
Hockney’s studio, Los Angeles, USA
David, when did you start those paintings? Because they weren’t here last time I came.
David October/November.
And how are they made? Is it based on a photograph?
David It’s based on probably 3,000 photographs.
So it’s a combination, a synthesis?
David Well, if that was one photograph, that big, it would be very, very flat.
And it’s the opposite of flat. It’s multi-dimensional.
David Yes, I’ve been finding things out about perspective. For instance, Andreas Gursky’s photographs, they can’t be read across the room like this one. Why? Because they use ordinary perspective. And ordinary perspective can only be seen up close. It can’t be seen a long way away. These, the further back you are, the more 3D it becomes.
Let’s talk about your painting Focus Moving. How would you define the moving focus? It comes from Chinese art, but what would be the definition of moving focus?
David I’ll send you the essay by George Rowley. It’s in a book called History of Chinese Painting. The chapter on moving focus is a marvellous chapter, because he takes you on a journey through a scroll. The rectangle shape, I think, is a (Leon Battista) Alberti (1404–72) window, but my new shape isn’t a window. It’s a hexagon. You can’t cut corners with pictures, because you make two more if you do. And I think it’s a marvellous shape. I think it’s going to cause a stir in New York.
[…]
Monday 27 July 2020.
Video call with Obrist in London and Hockney at his studio in Normandy, France
I hear you’ve been doing more iPad drawings.
David I’ve done 110 pictures of spring.
Yes, our friend Erica Bolton told me. And you also did a big new painting?
David Yes, I’m going to start painting in another week, but the iPad is always available and there’s no cleaning up. I’ve been watching all the spring changes in my garden here–I mean I don’t have to leave home. It’s been fantastic. And the iPad is the only thing I could have done 110 works on. I couldn’t have done 110 paintings.
Friday 10 May 2024.
Hockney’s studio, London, England
So you would say that works from when you were 16 would be the beginning?
David Yes, they’re the first ones in there. I was 16 years old, and there’s a self-portrait, a collage done on newspaper. The only newspaper I could get that had only type on it was The Times.
So what year would that be?
David 1953. When I was 16 years old. In 1960, I was 23, so I remember the 1960s very well. And what I thought was, the 1960s would go on, on and on, like it was. Well, it didn’t really. But I’m really glad I’ve lived when I did, because you could smoke on the underground, you could smoke on the buses, you could smoke on the trains, you could smoke in restaurants. And now, it’s just gone mad. We don’t want anybody smoking anywhere.
The work you did before 16 doesn’t exist, it starts with the earliest work you have, no?
David Yes, 1953.
And what did you paint when you were 16? Self-por- traits?
David I did a self-portrait, I did a painting of a laundrette. People in rooms, with a little gas fire that was all broken, like they were. You used to see them like that. I just painted anything around me.
And did you have books about art at 16?
David There were books in the library. Those Skira books, the first ones on Impressionism and things. You had to wash your hands before you could even touch them. And then I was given as a Sketch Club prize, a book— three and sixpence it cost—of Piero della Francesca [c. 1415–92]. And I’m sure I still have it somewhere.
Were you drawing outside, en plein air?
David Sometimes, and sometimes I was in the window downstairs, looking east to where the moon rises. I drew the first one because I woke up to take a pee. And I got up and I put the light on. And then I saw this moon out through the window. So I put the light off and sat looking at it for quite a while. And then I got back in bed. And then I thought, “Oh, I should draw it now.”
Read the full interview on Muse February Issue 67.
