MILAN.- Studio Marconi ’65 presents the exhibition David Hockney: Etchings and litographs 1961 -1969.

David Hockney is one of Britain’s most distinguished living artists, with fifty years of activity since his first works at the Royal College of Art, London where he gratuated in 1962.

On show there are nine litographs, three of which are from the file Illustration for fourteen poems by greek poet C. P. Cavafi, started in London in 1967 after a travel to Beirut.

Literature has always been a very important source of inspiration for Hockney: he painted a lot of pictures from the poems of Whitman, Blake and in 1969 he realized some etchings from the Six Fairy Tales by Brothers Grimm. In the etchings from Cavafi’s poem, The Beginning, A Remain and The Shop Window of a Tobacco Store, there are no colour. Hockney said that he didn’t like too many coloured etchings. A recurrent feature in his work, above all in the work from this period, is the flatness of the image. I always think etching is really a linear medium – the best etchings are linear etchings. And the line is used by Hockney also to tell a story.

Titles are, as always in his work, witty, intelligent with a subtle irony and arouse the spectator’s curiosity and drive him to watch the work more deeply. Here some of the titles of the works exhibited: Cleanliness is Next to Godliness (1964), The Fire of Furious Desire(1961) clear on the etching, The Beginning (1967) and An Imaginary Landscape (1969).

Hockey shows different subject, he said about his source of inspiration: “My own sources of inspiration were wide, but acceptable. In fact, I am sure my own sources are classic, or even epic themes. Landscape of foreign lands, beautiful people, love, propaganda, and major incidents (of my own life). These seem to me to be reasonably traditional”.

One of the first exhibitions of Studio Marconi was just the David Hockney’s one, displayed in march 1966 with Galleria dell’Ariete.

“Since that year - Mr. Marconi says – it seems to me that David Hockney has never exhibited in Italy, even if he is one of the most influencial artists of the twentieth century.

So I think it is appropriate to Studio Marconi ’65, an exhibition space where I want to do interesting things for collector’s, to present some litographs by Hockney. A Hockney exhibition at my Foundation would be too expensive. But I really like to show some works of this artist because I think he was one of the first to bring a personal change into the way of seeing and he was one of the main protagonists of the English Pop Art.”

David Hockney was born in Bradfor, Yorkshire, in 1937. After studying at Bradford School of Art in 1959 he enrolled on Royal College of Art in London, where he met the artist Ron Kitaj.

In 1964 he moved to Los Angeles, a place that had a very strong influence on his work. Enchanted by light, colour, spaces and freedom he started to paint the people he met there. In this period he took his first polaroids, he started working with acrylics, and began to teach at Iowa University, Iowa City, at University of Colorado in Boulder, at University of California in Los Angeles and at Berkeley. In 1966 he draw the costumes and the set for Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry at Royal Court Theatre in London. In 1968 he moved to London and worked intensely with his photos using it as preparatory studies for his paintings. In 1973 he moved to Paris where he realized a series of artists’s portraits, as the one of Andy Warhol. In 1976 he moved back to Los Angeles, where he will live until 2009, when he will be back to Yorkshire.

David Hockney was the subject of a lot of solo shows, among the most important we have to mention: David Hockney: Recent Paintings, Pace Wildenstein, New York (2010); David Hockney – Myself and My Heroes, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg (2007); David Hocney – Portraits, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, (2006); Drawing Retrospective, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, (1996); David Hockney: A Retrospective, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and Tate Gallery, London (1988).

His works had been included in important museum’s collection: National Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Siftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna; Kunstmuseum, Basel; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Museum Boijmans-Vanbeuningen, Rotterdam; Singapore Art Museum; National Portrait Gallery, London; Royal Academy of Arts, London; Tate Gallery, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Art Institute of Chicago; Hirshorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Smithson Institute, Washington; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco.