This sense of an immanent and imminent human presence is not limited to Hockney s American landscape paintings, for it also appears in his paintings of the Yorkshire countryside with heavily contoured pastures and such signs of agricultural modernization as giant hay rolls and distant reapers. The formative human hand in landscape repeatedly makes itself known through Hockney s eyes. Roads repeatedly shape Hockney s landscapes, a human development that penetrates the landscape deeply but ultimately cannot overwhelm a resistant geography. Humanity is never over-welcome in Hockney s road landscapes. The population may present behind the house curtains, but remain invisible.
Roads stay forever empty, built and used but untrafficked.
Yet even while there are clear debts to Picasso and a shared playfulness, Hockney attempts and achieves panoramic interior compositions that distinguish his vivid experimentalism. The exhibition s survey of Hockney s development begins in the early 1960s, when Magritte s surreal sense of space and other Magritte influences were decidedly present in Hockney s work. During that time, Hockney discovered the visual overlap between this European-born surrealism and the sterile linearity in southern California s architecture. Commercial and bank buildings that lacked any conceptual embellishment beyond the banal minimalism of Internationalist style became fields for formal experimentation. That same desolation predominates in Hockney s many canvases of domestic architecture in California, with absent, isolated or disappearing residents.