A spectacular image by one of the world’s most celebrated living painters has gone on display at a Kent art gallery.
The colourful work, which measures 10m x 7m, is a scaled-up version of David Hockney’s Sunrise in Normandy and now occupies the floor-to-ceiling Sunley Window at Turner Contemporary in Margate.
The David Hockney artwork, which has been unveiled at the Turner Contemporary in Margate. Photo: Above Ground Studio
Originally created on an iPad in 2020, the work was specifically adapted and enlarged by the artist to celebrate the venue’s 15th anniversary, creating a “luminous threshold between the gallery and the shoreline”.
The installation coincides with a major exhibition at Serpentine in London by Hockney entitled A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting.
But Turner Contemporary says its exhibition offers visitors outside the capital a rare opportunity to see work by Hockney.
The colourful image has been drawing visitors to the gallery after being unveiled on April 1, with children from Salmestone Primary School among the first to see it.
Gallery bosses say the work, which will remain on show until November 1, resonates with Turner Contemporary’s founding vision.
Pupils from Salmestone Grange School were among the first to admire the impressive piece at the Turner Contemporary. Photo: Above Ground Studio
Hockney, who briefly taught at Maidstone College of Art in 1962, has frequently acknowledged his admiration for JMW Turner, particularly his radical treatment of light, atmosphere, and landscape.
“Installed on the site of the former boarding house where Turner stayed in Margate, Hockney’s sunrise aligns two artists through a sustained focus on light, the seasons, and the experience of looking,” gallery bosses say.
Hockney briefly held the record for the most valuable piece of work to be sold at auction by a living artist after his Portrait of an Artist (pool with two figures), fetched $90.3 million at Christie’s in November 2018.