We dealt recently with Ronald Kitaj and his chiquita piconera, today we shall talk about another great British Pop character: David Hockney. He too made his peculiar grand tour around the romantic Andalucía. It was in spring of 2004 when he visited the three Andalusian architectural  treasures: Córdoba, Granada and Seville. 

He worked a lot on is notebooks, depicting the everyday impressions of the tour. Aquarelles and oil paintings on simple notebook pages would later serve for greater more definitive  works. All this work on Andalucía was then exhibited in the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition of 2004. One of Hockney's drawing of the arcs of the Mezquita presented the Exhibition (down). A central piece: the forest of columns harvesting the strength of the old Mezquita, not letting it fall yet. That forest would sink its teeth deep into Hockney's heart so he wouldn't forget. The drawing comes fresh and quick, with nerve, and Hockney uses his mastery on space and color to drive up the spacial and psychedelic sensations of the “palm trees forest”.

Hockney's exhibition received the astonishing figure of 478,089 visitors, the most visited exhibit of the gallery from Millbank (either back when it was the Tate Gallery or since 2000 when it changed name to Tate Britain), from the 9th of February to the 29th of May of 2017 an average 4300 visitors per day. This give us an idea of how relevant his view of the world is nowadays. 

Of course the painting “Andalucía Mosque, Cordova” remains a central piece within the exhibition.