Istanbul Sabancı Museum greets arrival of spring with Hockney
SAKIP Sabancı Museum (SSM), one of Istanbul’s most prominent museums, is celebrating the arrival of the spring with a new exhibition featuring works by English painter, draftsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer David Hockney. “The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020,” organized in collaboration with Akbank, will be displayed at the museum until July 29.
Hockney, an important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s, is considered one of the most influential and creative artists of our time. The artist received education at the Bradford College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London. After visiting the U.S., Hockney then taught at the universities of Iowa, Colorado and California.
The artist’s oeuvre mostly comprises autobiographical works, including selfportraits and depictions of his friends and his quarters. During the 1990s, Hockney experimented with abstract painting, contemplating the representation of space.
Starting to pursue his long-standing interest in new technologies and different methods of making art, Hockney then began to draw on an iPhone and iPad in the early 2000s. “The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020” at SSM is actually a culmination of this particular technological quest.
The exhibition features 116 of the iPad paintings of the artist, the subject of which heralds the arrival of the spring. The paintings were made by the artist in Normandy in 2020, during the very first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In these paintings, Hockney depicts a landscape filled with fruit trees, bushes, flower beds, ponds and rivers, fields, and distant hills, capturing the annual cycle of spring from bare trees to buds, flowers, and abundant green foliage. The exhibition celebrates the season from beginning to end, reminding the viewers of the miracles of the natural world and its constant renewal.
SSM is the third museum venue for “The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020”, which was previously shown at the Royal Academy in London and Bozar in Brussels.