How do you set about making a big splash? The question surely crops up when you are about to open a new art gallery — not least when its construction has gone enormously over budget. The director of Nottingham Contemporary certainly found a good answer.
Britain’s latest monument to contemporary creativity opens today. It makes a striking — though, from the outside, not particularly beautiful — addition to a busy city junction. For its inaugural exhibition it brings us not just the work of the nation’s most famous contemporary artist (bar Damien Hirst, perhaps), but the work of this artist at his most famous period. A Marriage of Styles brings together the most impressive assemblage of paintings, etchings and drawings done by David Hockney in the Sixties. His iconic canvas A Bigger Splash is at its heart.
This exhibition surely counts as a coup: a testimony to the calibre of an arts outpost that comes complete with 740sq m (8,000sq ft) of gallery space, a magnificent subterranean performance theatre, a mandatory caf? and education area, some palatial loos and an intriguing cabinet of curiosities to boot.
Hockney was barely into his twenties by the beginning of the Sixties but he already — even as a student — had a national reputation. He was a social phenomenon. His images from London and then Los Angeles came to define their decade.
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This exhibition is a selection of 50 of these, borrowed principally from the Tate and British Council collections but with a few international loans and one work never exhibited before (it came from a private collector who, hearing of the forthcoming show, rang up and offered his picture). Together they present a portrait of an artist struggling in the face of the fashion for abstraction, to make figurative art that could still take account of Modernism. They capture the spontaneity and variety of his approach as he works in anything from oil, etching and acrylic to coloured crayon. They speak of his wide-eyed wonder at the world as, inspired by Modernist masters, magazine images, graffiti, films and photographs, he fits together a vision that, in its day, felt completely fresh.
Hockney’s shimmering poolscapes, his scattering lawn sprinklers, his athletic young lovers, spoke to Sixties Britain of what must have then seemed an alluring glamour, a sybaritism that tasted of forbidden fruit. Certainly Hockney’s open exploration of his homosexuality (then still illegal) must have felt as startling to some as it was enticing to others. Hockney moves from a cryptic outing of Cliff Richard as a gay icon to an open celebration of bare Californian buttocks.
This is a show to return the viewer to the first freshness of Hockney’s vision. It represents a vibrant start for this new museum.
Opens today, to January 24 (www.nottinghamcontemporary.org, 0115-924 2421)