David Hockney: Perspective Should Be Reversed, Prints from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation

Drawn from the collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation, David Hockney: Perspective Should Be Reversed is a major exhibition surveying the groundbreaking prints of acclaimed British artist David Hockney. The works on view reflect Hockney’s career-long exploration into new ways of thinking about art, perception, and the visual world. Equally skilled as a painter and a printmaker, Hockney adapts everyday devices like office copiers, iPhones, and iPads into printmaking tools, and bends the rules of art making in colorful and comical ways. 

The largest survey of prints in the artist’s sixty-year career, this traveling exhibition features over 145 works, ranging from 1954 – 2022, drawn from the collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation in Portland, Oregon. The subjects and series that have come to define the celebrated artist’s international fame are included, such as his tender and often quirky portrayals of family, friends, and same-sex intimates, Southern California swimming pools, towering panoramas, jumbled studio interiors, and playful theatrical designs.

David Hockney: Perspective Should Be Reversed is organized around the reoccurring opposites present within Hockney’s works and is divided into five thematic sections: On Stage and Page, Interiors and Exteriors, Tradition and Innovation, Ordinary Objects and Extraordinary Renderings, and Portraits of Self and Others. 

The greatest opposition – or duality– running through the presentation is Hockney’s creative commingling of tradition and technology. He views past artistic movements through current-day lenses, shining a new light on how our creative engagement with art, creativity, and technology may help us negotiate our complex world through insightful and delightful new perspectives. 

David Hockney: Perspective Should Be Reversed, Prints from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation is organized by the Honolulu Museum of Art in partnership with the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation and curated by Catherine Whitney, director of curatorial affairs, and Katherine Love, assistant curator of contemporary art, Honolulu Museum of Art.