David Hockney

Born in Bradford, Yorkshire (1937), David Hockney studied at the Bradford School of Art (1953-57) and the Royal College of Art (1959-62).

David Hockney has been engaged with portraiture since his teenage years when he painted "Portrait of my Father" (1955), and his self-portraits and depictions of family, lovers and friends.His portraits, self-portraits, still lifes and scenes of friends are characterized by his concern with light, bright colours, and frankly realism derived from Pop Art and photography.

During his time at the Royal College, Hockney won a gold medal and the Guinness Award for Etching in 1961. He was awarded a prize in the Junior Section of the John Moores Liverpool Exhibition in 1961 and in the Graphics Section of the Paris Biennale in 1963. He exhibited as a Pop at the Kasmin Gallery in 1963. He was given a retrospective exhibition called “Paintings, Prints and Drawings 1960-1970” at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1970.

Between 1963-1967, he lived in Los Angeles. Due to the mild californian atmospheres (the light, the gardens, the pools, the Beverly Hills architecture and the beaches), he changed substantially his paintings, using acrylic paint instead of oil paint. In 1964 he painted his first California pictures, including his first pool work. In the same year Hockney was invited to make a print at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, which spearheaded the printmaking explosion in the United States. At Tamarind, Hockney met Ken Tyler, a trainee printer destined to found two world-famous workshops: Gemini in Los Angeles and Tyler Graphics in New York. Hockney made several important portrait lithographs at Gemini in 1973.

In the 1970s, he achieved prominence as a set designer for the opera and ballet. He later experimented with photography and photocollage, and still later with computer technology and printers.He carried on with his work with book illustration based on the cavafy poems and the Brothers Grimm tales and fine portrait work.

Hockney has gained a reputation for his success in drawings, witty etchings, double portraits, inventive photo-collages, opera sets and for his paintings of Southern California.

Throughout his career, Hockney has explored and reveled in the variety of techniques and effects offered by printmaking processes. He has also studied the techniques used by Picasso and spent two years working with Picasso’s printer in Paris. Hockney has recently produced homemade prints on Canon and Kodak office copiers, transmitted huge murals to exhibitions by fax and made drawings on Computer Paintbox for the Television. Hockney continues to live and work in California using his immediate surroundings as subject matter for his work.

If you want to see some of his work, click here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxANi2OeW4w

Sources:
Clarke, David (1996): Art & Place - Essays on Art From Hong Kong Perspective. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Hoffmann, Frank (1990): Arts & Entertainments fads, Volume 1990, Parte 2. New York: The Haworth Press, Inc.
Melia, Paul (1995): David Hockney. UK: Manchester University Press.
Osterwold, Tilman (2003): Pop Art. Köln: Taschen.

Damien Hirst

Born in Bristol, in 1965, Damien Hirst studied at Godsmith's College, University of London, 1986-1989.

While still a student, he organized a collective exposition called "Freeze", which included works of his colleagues and his. This exposition turned him famous.

Damien Hirst’s best known works are his paintings, medicine cabinet sculptures, and glass tank installations. For the most part, his paintings have taken on two styles. One is an arrangement of color spots with titles that refer to pharmaceutical chemicals, known as Spot paintings. The second, his Spin paintings, are created by centrifugal force, when Hirst places his canvases on a spinner, and pours the paint as they spin. In the medicine cabinet pieces, Hirst redefines sculpture with his arrangements of various drugs, surgical tools, and medical supplies.His tank pieces, which contain dead animals, that are preserved in formaldehyde, are another kind of sculpture and directly address the inevitable mortality of all living beings.

His work is often challenging in subject matter and difficult to live with. Hirst's subjects include animal corpses, skulls, flies, maggots and religious iconography. His work consistly revolves around the intertwined topics of science and religion, questioning the transition of society from a belief in God to a belief in drugs and science.

Sources:

http://collection.britishcouncil.org/collection/artist/5/18231

http://www.britishmuseum.org/the_museum/museum_in_london/london_exhibition_archive/statuephilia/damien_hirst.aspx
http://www.gagosian.com/artists/damien-hirst/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/damienhirst
http://www.eyestorm.com/artists/profile/Damien_Hirst.html

Personal reflection:

Damien Hirst work is definitely a mixture of science and religion, an art with a new perspective about life and death, repulsion and beauty. It is somehow connected to human life. 

But his work can provoque strong reactions. It challenges us to reflect about the human condition, to explore the questions "what is death?", "what is life?", "why do we exist?". If we think about this for a moment, well, his work seems to have a great purpose. But when I see all these real animal corpses preserved in tanks, "macabre", death, repulsion are the words that comes instinctively to my mind. Why? I really can't  explain.

Nevertheless, I appreciate indeed the statue "Virgin Mother", a reflection about the beginning of life, birth, and the sculpture "For the Love of God", not because of the skull but due to its originatlity, hard work of encrusting the diamonds and its beauty ("The diamonds are the girls best friend").

Lucian Freud

Lucian Michael Freud, Sigmund Freud's grandson, was born in Berlin in 1922. In 1933 he emigrated with his family to England, where he acquired British nationality in 1939.

His earliest love was drawing, and he began to work full time as an artist after being invalided out of the Merchant Navy in 1942.

In 1951 his Interior at Paddington (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) won a prize at the Festival of Britain, and since then he has built up a formidable reputation as one of the most powerful contemporary figurative painters.

Portraits and nudes are his specialities, often observed in arresting close-up.

His early work was meticulously painted, so he has sometimes been described as a `Realist', but the subjectivity and intensity of his work has always set him apart from the sober tradition characteristic of most British figurative art since the Second World War.

In his later work (from the late 1950s) his handling became much broader.

His portrait Benefits Supervisor Sleeping from1995 was sold for $33,6, one of the most expensive work sold at this point.

"Many of the figures are asleep, exposed, vulnerable. You can't help feeling that they have in some way become Freud's victims. The painter is a voyeur and he transfers this sensation to the viewer of the paintings. There is a slight sense of guilt in viewing Freud's work, as if you are an intruder in a private space. In one portrait of a nude woman sleeping, there is the shadow of a head on the floor. It is surely meant to be Freud's. But it also become the viewer." (Cockburn:2004:181)

Sources:

- Cockburn, Alexandre: Serpents in the garden: liaisons with culture & sex. 2004. California: CounterPunch

- Los Angeles Magazine, April 2003

- Stremmel, Kerstin: Realism. 2004. Köln: Taschen.

My point of view:

In fact, when I see his naked portraits, I don't feel repugnance. I am seeing people in a very pure essence and reality, in a state of calm, purity and simplicity, with body details and expressions. Lucian Freud's work is very detailed, nothing is missing. And, yes, I feel more like an intruder, a voyeur than a simple viewer. It's almost as I am invading the space in the portrait.

I am not a fan of his work but I admire it because it is a way of drifting apart from the real and superficial beauty. It is another perception of real life, real people.