David Hockney is one of the most important contemporary artists living today. In this interview he talks about the birth of photography and its “murky” role in art history. A theme that he deals with in his groundbreaking book ‘The Secret Knowledge’. “Art history has never known how to deal with photography,” Hockney says and points out how the “camera vision” has influenced art and the artistic process.

David Hockney (b.1937) is an English painter, printmaker, photographer and stage designer, who is considered among the most influential and versatile British artists of the 20th century. Hockney studied at the Royal College of Art where in 1960 he was featured in the exhibition ‘Young Contemporaries’ that announced the arrival of British Pop art. Though he was associated with the movement, his early works display expressionist elements, not dissimilar to some works by Francis Bacon. Hockney sought ways of reintegrating a personal subject-matter into his art, and began tentatively by copying fragments of poems on to his paintings, which later gave way to open declarations in a series of paintings produced in 1960–61 on the theme of homosexual love. In the early 1980s, Hockney began to produce photo collages, which he called “joiners,” first using Polaroid prints and subsequently 35mm, commercially-processed color prints. Using Polaroid snaps or lab-prints of a single subject, Hockney arranged a patchwork to make a composite image. His work can be found in numerous collections worldwide, including National Gallery of Australia, National Portrait Gallery and Tate Gallery in London, Museum of Modern Art And Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Centre Pompidou in Paris, De Young Museum in San Francisco and Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo. Since the late 1960s, Hockney has had homes in both England and California.

David Hockney was interviewed by Christian Lund, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, March 2011 in connection to the ’Me Draw On iPad’ exhibition.

Produced by: Martin Kogi and Christian Lund
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

Supported by Nordea-fonden