Hockney Wants To Paint 1,000 Portraits
David Hockney doesn’t do things by half. The industrious artist tells the Serpentine gallery supremo Hans Ulrich Obrist that he wants to paint 1,000 portraits of his friends and family. With 82 portraits (and one still-life) by Hockney now on show at London’s Royal Academy of Arts (until 2 October), there’s plenty of scope for a bigger show in the future. (Hockney’s 2013 portrait of artist John Baldessari is pictured.) The interview in Obrist’s new book, “Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects,” included a note of self-doubt about another grand project. Hockney feared that it could be a problem to autograph all of the copies of “A Bigger Book” for his friend, publisher and Los Angeles neighbor, Benedikt Taschen. Taschen’s forthcoming monograph on Hockney, which is described as a “Sumo-sized career retrospective, curated and signed by the artist,” is due this winter.
