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In spring 2022 for the first time in Austria the Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien is devoting a comprehensive retrospective show to the British artist David Hockney. Hockney, one of the most multifaceted and influential artists of the present day, has been experimenting for more than 60 years with the media of painting, drawing and graphics.

Besides his iconic Swimming Pools the exhibition spotlights Hockney’s precise exploration of the landscape, the portrait and the nude, which always has links to his own biography and identity: thus Hockney shows a constant preoccupation with queer eroticism – and at a time when homosexuality was still a penal offence in Great Britain. In his landscapes Hockney returns time and again to his roots in the North of England; these works often hover at the borderline to representational art and are in charged contrast to the depictions of modernist architecture and clean aesthetic of the American West Coast, a second centre of Hockney’s life. He analyses different forms of expression in an experience of perception oscillating between the concrete and the abstract. With The First Marriage (1962), Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1970–1971) and My Parents (1977) several of the artist’s major works are being transferred from the Tate Collection in Great Britain to Vienna.

Furthermore, the show directs a focus onto David Hockney’s comprehensive work in printed graphics, which he has consistently developed ever since the beginning of his artistic career. Milestones in the history of printed graphics will be presented in the Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien, including the etching cycles A Rake's Progress (1961–1963) and Cavafy (1966).