Coming Soon: First Show of Hockney Portraits:

will include self-portraits of the artist as well Since 1955, David Hockney has been engaged in painting portraits — self-portraits as well as portraits of family members and friends – to make a kind of visual diary of his life. But though portraiture has been a consistent theme in Hockney’s work, and there have been numerous exhibitions of his works in all media, there has never been an exhibit devoted exclusively to his portraits – until now. Los Angeles County Museum of Art is now preparing an exhibit of Hockney portraits that will open in June. LACMA’s presentation, called simply “David Hockney Portraits,” will include some of the artist’s most recent works, which have not been previously shown. Organized by the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in collaboration with LACMA, the show will be comprised of approximately 120 works of art that illustrate both the full range of Hockney’s creativity and the often circular nature of his aesthetic preoccupations. “David Hockney Portraits” will be the third Hockney exhibition at LACMA. It follows a museum-organized retrospective in 1988 and a show of his drawings in 1992.The British-born Hockney is a long-time Los Angeles resident. The Los Angeles presentation has been made possible in part by LACMA’s Wallis Annenberg Director’s Endowment Fund.Established as an independent institution in 1965, LACMA has a permanent collection that includes approximately 100,000 works of art spanning the history of art from ancient times to the present, making it the premier encyclopedic visual arts museum in the western United States.