The thin thread that binds Hockney to Piero della Francesca

David Hockney is probably the most famous and celebrated living artist in the world. At 86 years old, this artist born in the city of Bradford in West Yorkshire in 1937 is the protagonist of extraordinary exhibitions in the four corners of the planet every year. At the National Gallery the occasion is linked to two paintings by Hockney, one depicting his mother and father and the other depicting his friend, the curator Henry Geldzahler. Two paintings that are put into dialogue with a work by a great Master of the past, Piero della Francesca, and one of his masterpieces The Baptism of Christ, a tempera painting on wood created around the middle of the 15th century which is part of the collections of the London Museum. The National Gallery is moreover a place that Hockney knows well and which he frequented assiduously throughout his life, finding inspiration in the portraits and landscapes of its vast collections and immersing himself in dialogue with artists from other eras who he always considered his contemporaries.