Harry Styles portrait unveiled for new David Hockney exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery

The updated exhibition - last staged at the London gallery for 20 days, prior to its closure due to Covid - will include examples of Hockney’s most recent portraits, seen for the first time, including a painting of singer Harry Styles.

The artist’s new paintings will be displayed alongside portraits originally exhibited as part of 2020’s presentation, rendered in pencil, pastel, ink and watercolour, using both traditional and non-traditional drawing equipment, including coloured pencil, pen, the 35mm camera and apps found on the iPhone and iPad.

Featuring around 160 works from public and private collections across the world, as well as from the David Hockney Foundation and the artist himself, David Hockney: Drawing from Life traces the trajectory of Hockney’s practice, predominantly through his intimate portraits of five sitters: his friend, Celia Birtwell; his mother, Laura Hockney; his former partner and curator, Gregory Evans; his master printer, Maurice Payne; and the artist himself.

“Hockney is one of the most internationally respected and renowned artists today, and to see his new portraits, made over the last couple of years and which demonstrate his constant and continuing ingenuity and creative force, is life affirming.”

Dr Nicholas Cullinan, director of the National Portrait Gallery

The exhibition, which runs from 2nd November until 21st January, 2024, will explore the artist’s work over the last six decades, with the addition of new portraits - depicting friends and visitors to Hockney’s Normandy studio. Each portrait was painted from life directly onto the canvas without any under drawing and completed in two to three sittings.

About David Hockney’s art

The artist is recognised as one of the master draughtsmen of our times and a champion of the medium.

David Hockney: Drawing from Life examines not only how drawing is fundamental to the artist’s distinctive way of observing the world around him, but also how it has often been a testing ground for ideas and modes of expression later played out in his paintings.

Over the past 60 years, Hockney’s experimentation with drawing has taken many different stylistic turns. The portrait drawings reveal his admiration for both the old masters and modern masters, from Holbein to Matisse. In more recent years, Hockney has returned to the distinctive mark making of Rembrandt and van Gogh.

In addition to the 33 new works, highlights of the exhibition include coloured pencil drawings created in Paris in the early 1970s; a selection of drawings from an intense period of self-scrutiny during the 1980s, when Hockney created a self-portrait every day over a period of two months; and rarely seen works, including his pivotal A Rake’s Progress etching suite (1961-63), inspired by William Hogarth’s engraving series with the same title (1697-64), ephemera documenting his relationships with the sitters, and the painting My Parents and Myself - an earlier version of My Parents in Tate’s collection.

The new-look National Portrait Gallery

The gallery has been closed since March 2020 for a major transformation, the biggest since the building opened 127 years ago. There’s a new entrance, new portraits while the main collections have been rehung and re-imagined. 

Dr Nicholas Cullinan, director of the National Portrait Gallery said: “Following our reopening and the success of a brilliant first summer, I am delighted to be restaging this major exhibition for David Hockney at the new National Portrait Gallery, which makes good on a pledge I made to David in March 2020 that we would return to his wonderful exhibition in better days.

“Hockney is one of the most internationally respected and renowned artists today, and to see his new portraits, made over the last couple of years and which demonstrate his constant and continuing ingenuity and creative force, is life affirming.”