David Hockney's Altered Perspectives at Harrods

Smuggled through subterranean tunnels perhaps? Wheeled in under cover of darkness? Or flanked by armoured guards? This was a Thomas Crown Affair-level dilemma I had been turning over in my mind ever since I first discovered that David Hockney, the king of colourists, would soon be in residence in the Halcyon Gallery on the Third Floor of Harrods. Tunnels, I was sure it would be tunnels… and so I posed exactly this question to Halcyon Gallery’s vice president and creative director Kate Brown when I sat screen to screen with her to discuss the show.

“Ah, we have our ways,” says Brown elusively. “Getting a painting into Harrods is a good challenge, but that is nothing compared to what we have had to do for private clients. We’ve needed to shut main roads – we’ve even had Park Lane closed – with cranes lifting art in over whole apartment blocks. And we have often done things in the dead of night.”Brown was assigned the enviable task of curating one of the Halcyon Gallery’s most captivating in-store exhibits in its 22-year history in Knightsbridge, showcasing a remarkably comprehensive collection of Hockney’s work spanning six decades of his printmaking. The resulting exhibition is a spectacle of scale, with prints reaching nearly 2m in height and stretching floor to ceiling, filling the space with his kaleidoscope of colour and characterful charm. So how does one go about showcasing such a titan of the art world? And in a department store no less? Brown is unfazed. “The limitations you have within somewhere like Harrods as a retail space actually provide a huge amount of opportunity for creating a big impact with the way you curate,” she says. She believes that ‘journeying’ is part of curation: pieces are arranged to be experienced in passing, not just approached from the other side of a room, which allows you to take in the artwork from a new perspective.

The exhibition, which is split between Harrods and Halcyon Gallery’s flagship space on Bond Street, features different themes, too. Pieces on show in Harrods will be grouped based on their medium, but colour will, of course, also be a theme that plays a curatorial role. Brown has further created seven new frame profiles just for the exhibition, using chrome and walnut in clean lines. “What’s amazing about the show,” explains Brown, “is that you are looking at a 70-year span; it’s pretty monumental. Most exhibitions are based on one Hockney series, so it’s rare that you would get that kind of arc – you know, 70 years of art-making over pretty much all print mediums from collage to photography, iPad and moving pictures.”

Whether you’re a Hockney collector with a specific checklist or simply looking for a place to start, Brown assures me that this exhibition will provide plenty of inspiration, with Hockney’s famous pools sitting alongside characterful portraits, prints from his California years, Yorkshire vistas and his Japanese-inspired weather series. But perhaps most intriguing from the oeuvre is Hockney’s work with photographic drawings, which began in the 1980s, in which the artist masterfully reorganises perspective with a patchwork of photographs. And by the 2010s, this Cubist approach had progressed into the collaging and compositing of figurative cut-outs within a print, directing the viewer’s gaze strategically around a scene.