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mortality

Two Medicine

December 3, 2020

Imagine you could learn 
the names of every river,
each upthrust mountain
and fault folded on itself:

Stephen Spender, April 9th 1982. Composite Polaroid, 34.75 x 30". Images courtesy of David Hockney, inc. unless credited otherwise. (Richard Schmidt)

David Hockney’s Timescapes

Hockney’s entire production over the three decades since 1982 has been shadowed by death and in many ways can be seen as a direct response to all of that dying—​a defiant celebration of life (“Love life!”) in the face of annihilation, the assertion of an almost aching tenderness in the very craw of mortality.