David Hockney: award winner 2018

With a career spanning seven decades, David Hockney OM CH RA (b. 1937) is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. From painting, drawing, printmaking, set design, and photography to media ranging from fax machines to iPads, Hockney’s innovative means of exploring the challenges of perspective and depiction remains unabated. Hockney’s career was recently celebrated in the survey exhibition David Hockney 25 at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, with over 400 works spanning seven decades of the artist’s oeuvre demonstrating Hockney’s profound understanding of art history coupled with his interest in modern technology to create new ways of seeing and presenting. Hockney's enduring body of work reveals his passion for life and curiosity about the world, epitomized by his signature phrase, “Love Life.” 

  • Jury statement:

     

    The 2018 Award goes to an artist who has been an important figure on the international art scene for many decades. He is one of the most popular and influential British artists of the 20th century. The winner is not only critically acclaimed as a painter and sophisticated printmaker, but also widely appreciated as a skillful draughtsman, technical innovator, photographer, and stage designer.

    David Hockney (b. 1937) made his first prints as a student in 1954 and has since created a large body of exquisite works in traditional printmaking techniques, such as etchings and lithography, as well as experimenting with “homemade” prints; using photocopies and faxes, and computer drawings. Printmaking and the restless investigation of new mediums and different techniques, has for Hockney, been an integral part of his examination and fascination with formal challenges, exploration of the spatial ideas of perspective, and the dialogue between abstraction and the figural. The artist’s technical mastery and lifelong experiments in printmaking has expanded the possibilities and our understanding of this field.

    It is a great honour for the QSPA board to present David Hockney with the first Lifetime Achievement Award for his distinguished contribution to the art of printmaking.

  • David Hockney, Artist and model, 1973-1974. Soft ground etching, lift ground etching. Edition of 100. ΒΈ