Image copyrightAPImage captionIn 2013, David Hockney said he had "almost given up on Bradford"
David Hockney's home city of Bradford is to honour the artist by opening a permanent gallery dedicated to his work to mark his 80th birthday.
The David Hockney Gallery will be housed in the city's Cartwright Hall.
"I used to love going to Cartwright Hall as a kid," Hockney said in a statement. "It was the only place in Bradford I could see real paintings."
The new gallery will show works ranging from early sketches to well-known paintings and his iPad drawings.
It will open on 7 July - two days before his 80th birthday.
Cartwright Hall claims to own the largest public collection of Hockney's earliest work and is converting one of its existing rooms into the dedicated Hockney gallery.
Its exhibits will include drawings and sketches from his days studying in the city, many of which, Cartwright Hall says, have rarely been seen in public and never all at once.
Image copyrightDAVID HOCKNEY/TYLER GRAPHICS LTDImage captionLe Plongeur, from 1978, will be among the paintings on show
The council-run gallery also owns later works including Le Plongeur, his 1978 pool scene.
Cartwright Hall curator Jill Iredale said: "It was important to us that we mark this birthday of one of the world's most significant, influential and engaging artists who just happens to be from Bradford.
"This new gallery will be a place where people will be able to see what inspired Hockney while he was here in the city and engage directly with some of his work from then through to now."
Image copyrightCARTWRIGHT HALLImage captionCartwright Hall is transforming an area that previously hosted rotating exhibitions
A permanent exhibition showcasing the artist's work already exists in Bradford's Salts Mill building.
Its 1853 Gallery displays a large number of his paintings and a further 49 pictures from his The Arrival of Spring collection are housed in a separate room.
Hockney was born in Bradford in 1937 and studied at Bradford Art School between the ages of 16 and 20.
He moved to London to study at the Royal College of Art in 1959 and went on to become one of the leading figures in British art.
He has not always had smooth relationship with his hometown - in 2013 he said he had "almost given up on Bradford" and that a suggestion that the council could sell some of its art collection to raise funds would make him give up entirely.
On Friday, a spokesman for Bradford Council said that proposal was never seriously considered.
In a statement, Sarah Ferriby, Bradford Council's executive member for environment, sport and culture, said: "Cartwright Hall is the natural home for a gallery celebrating David Hockney, a son of Bradford and much loved as an artist all over the world.
"It will be so exciting to view his early work gathered together so we can see what initially inspired him and how his work developed over the years.
"This permanent gallery will boost Cartwright Hall's status as 'must-go-to' destination for visitors to the district and for all Hockney lovers everywhere."
Opening on Tuesday October 4th, 2016
from 6 to 8 pm
Koons
Press release
"Great artists are always complex and complicated figures. Unlike philosophers, they are also able to simplify matters, enabling understanding at a single glance by which all is revealed. Ut pictura poesis – ‘as is painting so is poetry’: an insight conjured by the Ancient Greeks and Romans. Mirrors from the very beginning have played an essential role in almost all of Jeff Koons’s work. They appear in the first inflatables of 1979, in which glass flowers and other ‘trite’ objects picked up in discount stores on 14th Street in New York were placed on mirrored platforms and backdrops. Since, many of his most ambitious works, such as the Balloon Swan, Balloon Monkey and Balloon Rabbit, shown spectacularly in New York in 2013, are finished with such shine that the viewer cannot but be aware of themselves many, many times as they circle the sculptures.
Koons goes further than Duchamp, who so famously described the viewer as the essential completer of the work of art, by literally embedding the viewer in his works of art, and as a result plays with their memories of childhood and, more recently, educated cultural experiences as they remember classical sculpture or the history of European painting dating from the Renaissance down to Picasso. Now for the first time he gives a nod and a wink to the originator of conceptualism, whose name is synonymous with art that makes pure and abstracted thought visible. At least that might be one way of describing the inventor of The Large Glass (1915-23). This all leads seamlessly into the concept of the blue glass gazing ball that Koons has now given, as though almost a gift, to some of the most decisive, at least as he regards them via museum encounters, masterpieces of Western European painting.
Inas Halabi, “Mnemosyne” (2016), video still (courtesy of the artist)
RAMALLAH — “For everyone it was very strange to see my grandmother in the newspaper!” says Inas Halabi, laughing and taking a moment to reflect on family life since winning the AM Qattan Foundation’s Young Artist of the Year Award. In the opening scene of Halabi’s video work “Mnemosyne” (2016), her grandmother sits on a cream-colored couch and directly addresses the camera, calmly and succinctly telling the story of the scar that marked her husband’s forehead.
“Mnemosyne” took the top prize in the 2016 edition of the YAYA, as it is affectionately known, which called on Palestinian artists under 30 to submit works related to the theme of “pattern recognition.” Halabi, who is based in Jerusalem and often works with archival and found imagery, filmed members of her mother’s extended family in her grandparents’ village of I’Billin. Each of them was asked to explain the scar on her grandfather’s forehead.
Halabi knew the basics — her grandfather had been grazed by the bullet of an Israeli soldier around the time of the Nakba, in 1948. But the story begins to shift and stretch as each family member tells their own version, rotating in and out of the same set: the couch outside her grandfather’s old farming barracks.
The YAYA exhibition was held in October in Ramallah’s Dar al Sa’a, where viewers could sit on the same couch as Halabi’s family members and ponder the complexities of history and memory by way of this single story. With the work now traveling to London, Halabi and I sat down in a busy Ramallah café to discuss family folklore, memory gaps, and how she is trying to tell Palestinian stories in new ways.
Mary Pelletier: What initially drew you to the story of your grandfather’s scar?
Inas Halabi: The first time I heard the story was about six years ago, from my mom. My grandfather passed away about four years ago, and the thing was that I never heard the story from him, and I never actually saw the scar — it was very subtle. When I first heard the story, I wasn’t thinking I could make a piece from it, but in my mind, I kept going back to it.
MP: What sparked the decision to explore the story through all of these different family members?
IH: I was looking through the description of the YAYA open call, and it was all about pattern recognition and rhythm. So the thought that came to my mind was the Chinese whispers game, or the telephone game, as we call it in Arabic, where one word is said to a person and passed on to another person, either changing or remaining the same. In my work, I’m very interested in storytelling and narratives related to personal and collective memory. I’m also interested in power structures and the relationship between memory, history, and myths. The three are never transferred identically and always undergo some kind of metamorphosis. All of these things are in there, in “Mnemosyne,” but this time it involved my family.
MP: You’ve worked with video many times before, but often with archival footage. Here, 9 or 10 family members are telling their versions of the same story — to me, it seems like they are your own family archive. How was preparing for this work different for you?
Inas Halabi, “Mnemosyne” (2016), video stills (courtesy of the artist)
IH: In the rest of my work, the process is very different — the starting point is generally a historical event or a certain individual I am interested in exploring, and the process involves a lot of archival research and collecting. These stories are generally related to Palestine or to the Arab world. I would describe them as forgotten or hidden histories. “Mnemosyne” is very different, both in its structure and its process, because I’ve never involved my family directly in this way before. I filmed 17 family members, including myself and cousins. I knew a lot of things were out of my hands, so the things I tried to control were the space, the location, and the framing of the filming. I also asked each family member to drink from the glass of water once they were finished telling their story. In each frame there was the couch, a glass of water on the floor, and the three questions: “What do you know about the scar on my grandfather’s body?” “Where was the scar exactly?” And I would ask if they could point to it. The third question was, “Who told you? How do you know about this story?” It was very important to me that I asked these questions only when we reached the location and right before I started filming. I didn’t want it to turn into a sort of interview or documentary.
MP: In the work, we see your family members answering these questions in slightly different ways, with distinct details and gestures. What have you learned from this process about storytelling? Has it informed the way you will go on to tell stories, as an artist?
IH: I feel, as an artist, it’s very subjective from my end. I’m the one who’s making the decisions, what language and words to use and what visuals will go along with that. The stories in “Mnemosyne” weren’t my stories, and during the process of making the work, both my family members and myself were somehow forced to take on the role of historian. From the start I was interested in how that would play out, when the source of the scar’s story, my grandfather, is no longer present. Storytelling includes a lot of repetition, issues of metamorphosis, of things shifting and becoming something else. With the editing, there were parts of the stories I did not include — that’s part of the decision-making power that I have as an artist over the work.
MP: The title of the piece, “Mnemosyne,” refers to the Titan goddess of memory, and it seems your family members show how elastic memory can be, how stories evolve.
IH: I feel like the story became longer and more complex, and at the same time, while some gaps were filled, a lot of gaps were created. I could have explored this with another story, but I was specifically interested in this story because the scar is another kind of memory — a physical one that is literally embodied. I’m interested in how that sort of physical memory is possible as well. I think what happened around the scar — it’s a personal history, but it’s also a collective history. And that’s what really matters. The same thing was happening to other people at the same time.
MP: Speaking of collective memory, do you see this work as relating to a larger Palestinian narrative?
IH: Definitely. It’s a personal family story, but it’s directly related to the narrative of what happened in 1948, with the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, because the scar happened at that time. In terms of the visuals, I didn’t want to have olive trees or the typical landscape that would go along with this kind of Palestinian narrative. I didn’t want to romanticize it. Also in terms of the Nakba, a lot of these stories have been perhaps told too much in the same way, where we aren’t able to process them anymore.
MP: As part of the Young Artist of the Year Award, the work is travelling to London. How will it change for you when it is shown outside of Palestine?
IH: I wanted to bring an object from the video, to place the viewer physically on the same couch or in the same space as the person sitting in the frame. This was how “Mnemosyne” was installed in Palestine during YAYA 2016 — the couch was brought over from the north of Palestine, to Jerusalem and then to Ramallah. Unfortunately, the couch won’t be reaching London for logistical issues, which changes the work for me. But these changes are OK. There are going to be new pieces that I will show in London as part of “Mnemosyne,” embroidered works on paper of family members and other visuals which I think will activate the space and the video in a different way.
Inas Halabi’s “Mnemosyne” will on view in Pattern Recognition, the AM Qattan Foundation’s Young Artist of the Year Award 2016 exhibition at the Mosaic Rooms (Tower House, 226 Cromwell Road, London) from January 20 to March 18, 2017.
AP
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