National Gallery of Australia Unveils Early David Hockney Works in New Exhibition

It was an expired driver's licence that spurred on one of the 20th century's most prolific art series.

British-born Los Angeles native David Hockney was stuck in New York with said expired licence when he began experimenting with colours, collage and transparent mylar sheets at lauded printmaker Kenneth Tyler's home, where he stayed for 49 days.

Delving into its own collection, the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) has unearthed a wealth of the artist's earlier works, pre-fame, from his days at the Royal College of Art to his first summer in Los Angeles, where he picked up the knack for the aforementioned signature style.

The exhibition underscores Hockney's pivotal collaboration with master printmaker Tyler.

The NGA holds more than 1,000 Hockney works, in what it describes as one of the most significant collections of Hockney in the Southern Hemisphere.

One of the NGA's most sought-after Hockney works, a Bigger Grand Canyon, is currently on loan to the Louis Vuitton Museum in Paris.

There are intimate portraits of past lovers, family, and friends from the 1960s, 70s and into the 1980s, showing some of his first colour prints and crayon drawings.

The exhibition features traditional mediums like etching, lithography, and photography alongside experimental tools such as the mylar sheets he used to create some of his famed pool pieces, and fax machines, tracing how portraiture anchored Hockney's work.

The show also features a set of iPad self-portraits, Hockney still exploring different art mediums even in to his 80s.

"I think really what that shows is that unfathomable creative drive and sense of experimentation in his art," NGA head curator of international art, Magda Keaney, says.

"So he's working across different media, but when he's working in portraiture you can come back to some central things, you come back to the face, you come back to that sense of intimacy, you come back to relationships."

Hockney took inspiration from the faces he saw around him, particularly in early works depicting British fashion designer and close friend Celia Birtwell, who was an early muse for the artist.

There are works spanning decades, intimately graphing their relationship.

Hockney eventually also began taking inspiration from those who came before him, as the displayed works follow him into the 1980s, when he "started exploring portraiture through other aesthetic means such as cubism and really interrogating how we see perspectives in pictures that comes from his great love of the artist Picasso", Ms Keaney says.

Celia received the Picasso treatment herself, in one of the larger, more colourful pieces in the exhibition that almost acts as an anchor to Hockney's other works in the exhibition.

A Rake's Progress

Described by King Charles as one of life's true originals: "One who wore his genius as lightly as those beloved yellow Crocs of his that helped brighten Palace occasions", even his earlier works were full of signature Hockney, who, just quietly, refused to paint Queen Elizabeth.

One piece that exudes his signature mischief is Hockney's A Rake's Progress, a semi-autobiographical series of 16 etchings and aquatints created between 1961 and 1963, re-imagining William Hogarth's famous 18th-century moral narrative series of the same name.

Also on display, the famed artist's faked art school diploma, which he submitted in place of his final course assignment at the Royal College of Art.

Early works of Hockney's, such as We Two Boys Together Clinging and Two Men in a Shower, celebrated gay relationships when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain, and while those are not featured in this exhibition, his experiences are tracked through sketches as a gay man finding his identity in his early career.

"Hockney's identity and his relationships are really integral to his work, and that's something he explores with some of his earliest works in the show," Ms Keaney says.

"The Rake's Progress, a group of prints where he humorously reprises Hogarth's parable [sic], but it's about Hockney's first trip to New York as an art school student, and that's a group of work in which he shows and depicts his identity as a gay man.

"His excitement coming from Bradford in the North of England, being in New York, discovering gay bars and being able to watch TV to 3am."

"It's very important to put the collection to work, and this exhibition displays that continuing strategy in celebrating the collection we have assembled from the early 70s into the present day," NGA director Nick Mitzevich says.

Dr Mitzevich says in the future, the gallery looks forward to giving the Australian public more of Hockney.

"We will be making announcements about further engagement with the collection, our immense holdings of David Hockney," he says.

"As a gallery director, you have to keep things up your sleeve."