An expired driver’s licence sparked one of the 20th century’s most prolific art series

An expired driver’s licence helped set David Hockney on the path toward one of the 20th century’s most prolific art series. Stranded in New York, the British-born artist from Los Angeles began experimenting with colour, collage and transparent Mylar sheets at the home of celebrated printmaker Kenneth Tyler, where he stayed for 49 days.

The National Gallery of Australia has drawn from its own collection to uncover a wealth of Hockney’s earlier, pre-fame work. The exhibition follows him from his days at the Royal College of Art to his first summer in Los Angeles, where he developed the style that would become one of his signatures.

The show places particular emphasis on Hockney’s collaboration with Tyler. The National Gallery of Australia holds more than 1,000 Hockney works, making it one of the most significant collections of his art in the Southern Hemisphere. A Bigger Grand Canyon, one of the gallery’s most sought-after works, is currently on loan to the Louis Vuitton Museum in Paris.

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I think really what that shows is that unfathomable creative drive and sense of experimentation in his art.

Portraiture provides the exhibition’s thread. Intimate portraits of lovers, family members and friends from the 1960s through the 1980s appear alongside some of Hockney’s first colour prints and crayon drawings. Etching, lithography and photography sit beside the Mylar sheets he used for some of his famous pool pictures, as well as fax-machine experiments. The exhibition also reaches into his 80s with a set of iPad self-portraits.

Magda Keaney, the gallery’s head curator of international art, said the range of media revealed Hockney’s “unfathomable creative drive and sense of experimentation in his art.” She said portraiture repeatedly brought him back to the face, intimacy and relationships.

Hockney drew heavily on the people around him, including British fashion designer and close friend Celia Birtwell. Works across several decades trace their relationship. Later, he explored portraiture through cubism and other approaches to perspective, influenced by his admiration for Pablo Picasso.

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So he's working across different media, but when he's working in portraiture you can come back to some central things, you come back to the face, you come back to that sense of intimacy, you come back to relationships.