Framed David Hockney exhibition card, 1996. Paintings and Photographs of Paintings

Framed David Hockney exhibition card, 1996. Paintings and Photographs of Paintings

Details:

• Media:          Folded Card
• Material.       Gloss Card, tri fold format
• Dimensions: 20cm x 17xm folded, 60cm x 17cm unfolded
• Rarity:           Limited Edition of unknown size
• Frame:          Painted wood (black)

Significance of the Exhibition:

1. A Direct Challenge to the Photographic Image

By the 1990s, Hockney had grown even more critical of how photography distorts reality, especially when used in reproducing artworks. This exhibition reasserts the difference between:

• The physical, material reality of a painting
• The flattened, altered perception given by a photograph of it

He was asking: "Is what we see in a photo of a painting really the painting?"

2. Exposing the Gap Between Original and Reproduction

The show deliberately juxtaposed:

• Paintings
• Photographs of those same paintings
• Sometimes even paintings of the photographs of the paintings

This recursive layering created an experience that made the viewer confront how each medium mediates reality differently — in color, light, texture, and space.

It turned the viewer into an active analyst, rather than a passive observer.

3. Philosophical Reflection on Art in the Digital/Reproducible Age

In the 1990s, reproduction technologies (scanners, Photoshop, digital cameras) were booming. Hockney’s exhibition responded to this by:

• Emphasizing what gets lost when art is digitized or photographed
• Advocating for the primacy of physical, direct visual experience
• Urging people to look more closely and slowly

This show can be read as a quiet protest against the increasingly mediated visual world.

4. An Expansion of his Theory of Seeing

Throughout the '90s, Hockney was developing ideas he would later publish in Secret Knowledge (2001), arguing that artists from the Renaissance onward used optical devices. The 1995 exhibition builds on that interest in how tools change what and how we see.

By displaying paintings and their photographs side by side, he subtly invited viewers to:

• Question optical conventions
• Consider subjective vs. mechanical seeing
• Value non-camera-based vision

5. Medium as a Message

In typical Hockney fashion, the title itself is a philosophical gesture — “Paintings and Photographs of Paintings” is a tautology that keeps looping back on itself. It suggests:

• Layers of removal from the original experience
• The importance of being aware of the medium through which we're seeing

In summary

The 1995 exhibition "Paintings and Photographs of Paintings" at the Robert Miller Gallery is significant because it:

• Refines Hockney’s critique of photography’s limitations
• Confronts the fidelity and authority of reproductions
• Encourages deeper engagement with visual truth, materiality, and perception
• Is a bridge between his early collage experiments and later optical theories
• Offers a meta-commentary on the nature of art in the age of reproduction