David Hockney: Paper Trails

The largest-ever display of Hockney’s paper-based works

British artist David Hockney is renowned for his distinctive paintings, mostly portraiture and landscape, but also for his approach to works on paper and printmaking, which mirrors the vibrancy and diligent indexing seen in his broader body of work. Hockney’s prints often showcase a dynamic interplay of color, form and perspective, reflecting his keen eye for visual storytelling of intimate elements of his own life. Throughout his career he has experimented with various printmaking techniques, including etching, lithography, screenprinting and more recently iPads, each method revealing his diligence in manipulating the medium—without ever experiencing, in his own words, “a feeling of failure.” Like much of his oeuvre, Hockney’s prints draw from extensive art historical study of the optical devices of Old Master paintings.