LONDON.- Pace Gallery inaugurated the third floor of its global headquarters with La Grande Cour, Normandy, an extraordinary exhibition of new drawings by David Hockney depicting the arrival of spring in the French countryside. This marks the first body of work created by the artist at his studio in Normandy, after which the show is titled.

In 2019, following his opening at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, Hockney began working at La Grande Cour. He first saw the property on a trip to France after the unveiling of his stained‑glass window at Westminster Abbey in London. Almost immediately, this new environment in Normandy inspired him to start this series of drawings. Through the use of playful and colorful marks, each drawing captures the vibrancy of Normandy’s landscape during the arrival of spring and reveals Hockney’s personal connection to the land. A large, twenty‑ four‑panel panoramic drawing, La Grande Cour portrays in great detail its subject: the full grounds of the property, with its multiple buildings and landscaped with cherry, pear and apple trees, hawthorne thickets and elderflower patches. Four individual drawings, depicting each side of the 17th century house and named after the view they display: north, south, east, west, are also featured in the exhibition.

From his photographic collages to his recent paintings on hexagonal canvases, throughout his celebrated six‑ decade career Hockney has challenged viewers to see depicted space differently and thus real space as well. La Grande Cour, Normandy continues this quest. Thousands of vibrant marks, which become a kind of autobiography of his mark making, mix with multiple perspectives to engage the viewer’s vision with the image. Hockney sees these drawings as an experience in motion, pulling the viewer into Normandy.

Beyond the studio, Hockney also drew on the non‑hierarchal format of Chinese scroll paintings and the Bayeux Tapestry: an embroidery on wool thread on linen cloth nearly 230 feet long, created in England in 1077, and housed not far from his studio in Normandy. The way in which the tapestry, which depicts the everyday life in medieval Europe and the tumultuous events leading up to the Norman conquest of England—and Chinese scroll paintings—are designed to be read narratively, influenced Hockney to create drawings which encompass the passage of time. In effect, Hockney’s work in La Grande Cour, Normandy unites multiple spatial and temporal experiences into single images that are in continuous dialogue with past and present moments.
A full color catalogue with a statement by Hockney describing the process of making the drawings will be published in conjunction with the exhibition.

David Hockney (b. 1937, Bradford, United Kingdom) has produced some of the most vividly recognizable images of this century. Hockney’s ongoing exploration of figuration and abstraction reveals a fundamental interest in the representation of pictorial space. His aesthetic pursuits stretch across a vast range of media, from the traditions of painting and printmaking to full‑scale opera stagings, photographic collage, and the incorporation of digital technologies such as fax machines, video, and iPads. Spanning practice and theory, Hockney’s investigation of artistic techniques has also developed through art‑historical research, resulting in Secret Knowledge (2001), his publication on the optical devices used by the Old Masters, as well as A History of Pictures: From the Cave to the Computer Screen (2016), written in collaboration with art critic Martin Gayford and further exploring the many ways artists have pictured the world.

Hockney has been the subject of 400 solo exhibitions held at numerous international institutions. He has been the subject of several retrospectives, including one organized in 1988 by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which then traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and Tate Gallery, London and the recent exhibition David Hockney which traveled to Tate Britain, London (2017), Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2017), and recently closed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2018).

Hockney’s work has been featured in the Biennale de Paris (1961, 1963, 1985, 1989); Biennale of Prints, National Museum of Art, Tokyo (1962); International Biennale, Hong Kong (1963); Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (1967, 1982); Biennale de São Paulo (1967, 1975); Venice Biennale (1968, 1989, 1995); Documenta, Kassel (1968, 1977, 2005); and the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial, New York (2004).

Hockney’s works are held in public collections across the globe, including Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Centre Pompidou, Paris; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Louisiana Museum of Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museu Colecção Berardo, Lisbon; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tehran; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; National Portrait Gallery, London; Nelson‑Atkins Museum, Kansas City; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate, London; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, among others.

Hockney has received accolades throughout his career, including nine honorary degrees from academic institutions worldwide. Among his honors, Hockney received a Guinness Award (1961), was elected Associate Member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London (1986), and made an Associate Member of the Academie Royale, Brussels (1987). He was made a Foreign Honorary Member by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1997. In the same year was awarded the Order of the Companion of Honour by Queen Elizabeth II, as well as the Culture Prize of the German Society for Photography, Germany’s highest award in the field of photography. In 2003 he was bestowed with the Lorenzo de Medici Lifetime Career Award at the Florence Biennale. Hockney was appointed to the Order of Merit by Queen Elizabeth II in 2012 and has been asked to design a 20 foot by 6‑foot stained‑glass window for Westminster Abbey in Her Majesty’s honor.

David Hockney has been represented by Pace since 2008. Significant exhibitions of his work at the gallery include Paintings 2006–2009 (2009); The Arrival of Spring (2014, 2015); Some New Painting (and Photography) (2014– 15); and The Yosemite Suite (2016, 2017).