Artist: David Hockney

Once, when we were just sitting outside the house, we put all the lights off in the house to see the moonlight more clearly. The moon could then be seen to cast shadows of the trees on the grass, so with my backlit iPad I could draw it. This would have been virtually impossible without it.
- David Hockney

In the spring of 2020, David Hockney was inspired by the sight of an unusually large moon—a supermoon, occurring when the moon is closest to Earth. Recalling the moment, the artist reflected on the challenge of capturing the experience through photography, emphasizing drawing’s unique ability to convey the intensity of perception: “I was looking at the moon for quite a while, and when you do that, you see this halo around it that you don’t see in photographs at all because it’s too far. That’s an example of the way lenses push things away. In a lens view, it would be disappointingly small... My niece said that she tried to photograph a big moon, and I said, ‘Well, no, you have to draw it, like the sunrise. It can’t be photographed because it is the source of light.’”

GRAY presents David Hockney: The Moon Room at the gallery’s Chicago location. The exhibition centers on a recently released series focused on the artist’s observations of the moon. Created in 2020 at his Normandy studio in France, Hockney used his iPad to make daily paintings of the surrounding landscape, working en plein air to capture the changing seasons as illuminated by moonlight. Hockney turned to the iPad for its immediacy and responsiveness, a medium that bridges the disciplines of painting and drawing while accommodating the spontaneity of working outdoors, especially in the dark. This is Hockney’s sixteenth exhibition with GRAY.

Throughout his career, Hockney has consistently engaged with new technologies, particularly those designed for widespread use and accessibility. From his early experiments with Polaroid cameras, photocopiers, and fax machines to his pioneering use of digital tools such as the Macintosh computer and Photoshop, his practice has continually evolved alongside technological innovation. Since 2009, the iPhone and iPad have become central to his work, enabling an expansive body of digital drawings and paintings. Introduced in 2010, the iPad, in particular, afforded the artist greater scale and precision, while its playback function reveals the temporal unfolding of each composition, offering insight into the process of its making.

The Moon Room was first presented by Florence Calame-Levert in David Hockney: Normandism, presented from March 3 through September 22, 2024, at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen in Normandy, France.