Entitled ‘Remember you cannot look at the sun or death for very long’, the video work by one of the world’s most celebrated living artists, David Hockney, was unveiled across a network of the world’s most iconic outdoor video screens in New York’s Times Square, Seoul, Tokyo, Los Angeles and the home of CIRCA — the Piccadilly Lights screen in London.

In this worldwide display of unity, Hockney’s animated sunrise sought to offer a symbol of hope and collaboration as the world awoke from its lockdowns. Members of the public across these four cities were able to see the commonplace advertisements paused and replaced for a spontaneous encounter with Hockney’s meditation on the arrival of spring.

Created on the artist’s iPad in Normandy, France, this global happening coincided with the release of Hockney’s book Spring Cannot Be Cancelled and his Royal Academy exhibition The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020.

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SCREEN LOCATIONS

For 365 days since, 50 artists (and counting) have presented new and immediate responses to the NOW across a growing network of screens in London, Tokyo, Times Square, Milan, Melbourne, Dublin and Seoul – sparking a dialogue both online and in the public space.
Over the course of several journeys around the sun, CIRCA is now far from where it departed. From one screen in Piccadilly Circus, we have grown into a global gallery without walls.

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London, Piccadilly Lights

Experience Remember you cannot look at the sun or death for very long by David Hockney every evening at 20:21 BST/GMT (1-31 May 2021) on the iconic Piccadilly Lights screen.

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New York, Times Square Arts

Experience Remember you cannot look at the sun or death for very long by David Hockney every evening at 23:57EST (1-31 May 2021) on the iconic Times Square screens.

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Seoul, K-Pop Square

Experience Remember you cannot look at the sun or death for very long by David Hockney every evening at 20:21 KST (1-31 May 2021) on Seoul’s COEX K-Pop Square screen.

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Tokyo, Yunika Vision

Experience Remember you cannot look at the sun or death for very long by David Hockney every evening at 09:00J ST (1-31 May 2021) on Tokyo’s Yunika Vision screen.

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Los Angeles, Pendry West Hollywood

Experience Remember you cannot look at the sun or death for very long by David Hockney every evening at 20:21 PST (1-31 May 2021) on the Pendry West Hollywood screen.

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David Hockney: Let The Sunshine In

Written by Henry Little

Dawn. A blue sky shot with red. Silhouettes of sleeping shrubs. A single bird traverses the full width of the horizon. A child-like sun, wobbly arms for rays, rises in the distance. Higher the sun rises, a second corona of wobbly rays appear. Higher and whiter the disc rises, until a third corona of longer fingers extend out towards the viewer, licking the foreground. A fourth spiral of yellow rays now fills the thin band of the horizontal composition, on the cusp of enveloping the entire scene. Thicker, heavier lines appear, ray upon ray. The scene fades to vivid, bright saturated yellow. The yellow of cartoon lemons and street lamps. The work’s title is etched in shaky letters across this final backdrop: Remember you cannot look at the sun or death for very long.

David Hockney’s new work for CIRCA will play for the month of May across the world on giant screens in London, Seoul, Tokyo, Los Angeles and New York. Spanning the full circumference of the globe, Hockney’s animated dawn will follow real dawn thirty-one times. Screened in the evenings, viewers will see the sun rise once again, not long after it dipped below the horizon. Coinciding in London with the opening of the Royal Academy’s new exhibition, David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020, the project further marks a moment of renewal for the country’s battered museums and the city’s dormant but fast rousing arts scene.

Press

Press Release
The Observer
iNews
The New York Times
Harpeers Bazaar
Soho House

Press release: David Hockney, Glastonbury

David Hockney: Let The Sunshine In

Gallery

Biography

David Hockney

David Hockney became known as a central figure of British Pop Art in the 1960’s and continues to be widely celebrated as one of the most influential living artists of our time.

Born in Bradford in 1937, he graduated from the Bradford School of Art in 1958 and studied at the Royal College of Art from 1959–62. Alongside his prodigious painting and drawing practice, he has constantly explored new technological possibilities in making art. In the 1980’s he embraced Polaroid film, photocopying and faxing and, more recently, digital media including photoshop and his iPad and iPhone as new means of conceiving and creating mesmerising multiple view and composite images. Now in his eighties, Hockney continues to create new works in all media with his unwavering desire to continually challenge conventions of perspective in art and how we truly ‘see’.