Arts and Design

Copulation at its fruitiest – David Hockney, Alan Davie, Christina Quarles review


Cocks, bums, breasts, bits of bodies and vagrant abstract symbols float about in two related painting exhibitions at the Hepworth. Pairing early works by the late Scottish painter Alan Davie (1920-2014) and David Hockney, the gallery sets out to acknowledge Davie’s influence on the younger Hockney, who took what he needed from the older artist and moved on, while Davie was still struggling to escape, most notably from Jackson Pollock. A second, attendant exhibition at the Hepworth, of American painter Christina Quarles, allows us to look at her work in the light of Hockney.

Davie’s earlier work was altogether too clamorous, clogged and beefy, and only by ditching all those layers of mark-making did he get anywhere close to the lightness and airy spaces of the best of Pollock’s all-over paintings. At times Davie’s art took a Pollock turn, a Miró turn, a Sam Francis turn.

Cool and sophisticated … Hockney’s Man in a Museum (You’re in the Wrong Movie).



Cool and sophisticated … Hockney’s Man in a Museum (You’re in the Wrong Movie). Photograph: courtesy the British Council Collection

In Davie’s art, heavy symbolism gave way to love-hearts, cleavages, buttocks, penis tips, hairy balls and pudenda. Words emerged, alongside squiggles, flurries and jumbly scribblings. “Glory” says one painting, in a sudden lapse into language. Next to it hangs an early Hockney, with the word “Love” written over the smeary, faecal forms.

Not yet 40, Davie held a retrospective at the former Wakefield Art Gallery in 1958, where it was seen by Hockney, then completing his national service before enrolling at the Royal College of Art the following year. The stray drips, the dirtied whites, the umbers, blacks and furry edges – all of which were familiar in British painting in the 1950s, and as much a continuation of European art informel as from American abstract expressionism – as well as the words got into Hockney’s work.

“Queen”, “thrust”, and most famously, “We 2 boys together clinging”, were more than random painterly mutterings, and open provocation in the art of the early 60s. While Hockney was being openly gay, and quoting Walt Whitman, Davie had begun adding brushed-on phrases: MANGO TIME, PEACH TIME, BANANA TIME to otherwise abstract canvases. You can take these, I suppose, as sexual euphemisms.

At the time of Davie’s 1958 show, the critic David Sylvester described him in terms of the “vehemence, sensuousness and generosity of great Romantic painting”. Give me banana time any day. Davie had a parallel life as a free-jazz musician, and as he began making his art more improvisational, so Hockney got more cool and sophisticated, ditching spattery grubbiness and physicality in favour of arch pictorial quotations, irony and games with different levels of abstraction and figuration. Queering painting as much as he was celebrating his own sexuality.

Squiggles and scribblings … Davie’s Crazy Gondolier.



Squiggles and scribblings … Davie’s Crazy Gondolier. Photograph: National Museum Wales/estate of Alan Davie

Which also provides a starting point for the work of Quarles. Born in 1984 and based in Los Angeles, Quarles’s large-scale paintings are filled with female bodies that extrude and bloat, stretch, slither, dangle and droop. Sometimes they get entangled as they clutch, quiver, kiss, caress and morph in all sorts of unlikely directions. And this is to say nothing as yet about the ways in which she paints these lascivious, fraught beings.

The painting keeps changing tack. Stencilled patterns give way to modelled and shaded limbs that then suddenly lose their three-dimensionality and become flat outlines, or turn into cartoonish drawing. Heads fade into washy silhouette under wodges of thickly painted and combed hair. Bodies go all harlequin-patterned, the scrabbling and clutching hands turn from the sensual to the mechanical.

There is a lot going on. Sometimes we are taken back to Hockney’s work from the 60s, and his own experiment with degrees and styles of representation. Quarles quotes his California swimming-pool paintings with her own white ripples on blue water. One can link to gear shifts in Hockney’s Rocky Mountains and Tired Indians, or in his Man in a Museum (You’re in the Wrong Movie) to the disjunctures in Quarles’ paintings. But as much as Hockney is in Quarles’ art, so you can also find hints of the body distortions in the self-portraits of Austrian painter Maria Lassnig, and in the paintings of US-based British painter Nicola Tyson in Quarles’ work.

Born to a white mother and black father, Quarles is pale-skinned, and often taken as white. The figures in her paintings refuse the normative. Her bodies exist in complex, interdependent ways with the spaces they inhabit. She has a complicated relationship to her artistic peers and forebears. As with Davie, and so with Hockney, we are all somehow under the influence, learning to escape.



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