Manship Artists Residency in Gloucester, Massachusetts presents Hockney Reproduction(s), an exhibition exploring David Hockney’s lifelong fascination with prints, posters, fax machines, photography and digital technologies
David Hockney’s restless curiosity about how images can be created, reproduced and shared is the focus of Hockney Reproduction(s), a new exhibition at Manship Artists Residency (MARS) in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Supported by the David Hockney Foundation, the exhibition brings together six decades of Hockney’s experiments with reproductive media, revealing an important strand of his practice that has often been overshadowed by his celebrated paintings and drawings.
Curated by artist, curator and writer Bing McGilvray, Hockney’s friend for more than 45 years, the exhibition explores the artist’s fascination with reproducing, reimagining, transmitting and sharing images. Featuring prints, books, photographs, multi-page faxed works and more than 75 posters, Hockney Reproduction(s) demonstrates how reproduction was not simply a way of disseminating Hockney’s art, but an integral part of his creative process.
Hockney Reproduction(s) runs from 11 September to 18 October, 2026 at Manship Artists Residency in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
Hockney was famously enthusiastic about new technologies and their possibilities for artmaking. Over the course of his career, he embraced photocopiers, fax machines, computers, iPhones, iPads and multi-screen video as tools through which he could experiment with perspective, colour, communication and the very nature of the image.
Among the exhibition’s highlights is a rare public presentation of Hockney’s fax works, including a remarkable 24-sheet drawing of a beach house. Created using a technology that has now become largely obsolete, the work demonstrates how Hockney transformed the humble office fax machine into an unexpected medium for artistic invention.
One of the featured works is a fax portrait of Joe Simon, offering a particularly vivid example of Hockney’s willingness to adapt his practice to the technology through which an image would be transmitted.
Hockney did not simply send existing drawings by fax. He began to draw for the fax, adapting his technique to the characteristics of the machine. The process raised questions about originality and authorship that remain strikingly relevant in today’s digitally connected culture. When a drawing created in Los Angeles appeared on paper in Boston, where did the original image actually exist?
This interest in transmission was closely connected to Hockney’s desire for his work to be seen and experienced by as many people as possible. Prints, posters and fax works became important vehicles through which his images could circulate beyond the traditional gallery and museum system.
I have the vanity of an artist – I want my work to be seen.” David Hockney
The exhibition brings together works from McGilvray’s private collection, other private collections and contributions from Salts Mill in Yorkshire, UK. Together, they trace Hockney’s playful and persistent engagement with changing technologies and reveal an artist continually asking how new tools might expand the possibilities of visual communication.
For McGilvray, the exhibition also has a personal connection to Manship Artists Residency, a charitable organisation providing artists with the time and space to develop new work. Hockney was reportedly particularly enthusiastic about the exhibition taking place at Manship, seeing an opportunity for his work to draw attention to an organisation supporting artists of the present.
That spirit of encouragement runs through Hockney Reproduction(s). Rather than presenting reproduction as secondary to the supposedly more important original, the exhibition positions it as a central force within Hockney’s artistic life.
From the photocopier and fax machine to the smartphone and iPad, Hockney repeatedly embraced technologies that allowed him to make images differently and reach new audiences. In doing so, his experiments anticipated many of the ways in which images are created, reproduced and shared today.
Hockney Reproduction(s) offers an opportunity to reconsider the work of one of the most influential artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through the lens of his technological curiosity. It reveals an artist for whom innovation was not about abandoning traditional artistic practice, but about finding new ways to look, make, communicate and share.
The exhibition is on view at Manship Artists Residency, Starfield, Gloucester, Massachusetts, from September 11 through October 18, 2026, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays from 1pm–5pm. Admission is free.
I’ve always been interested in printing as a medium, and also as a medium through which my work can be known—can reach a public. So I’ve taken an interest in any technology to do with image-making: printing, cameras, reproduction itself. Lots of artists aren’t interested…but I am interested” David Hockney
David was endlessly curious. Whenever a new technology appeared, he wasn’t interested in whether it was fashionable, he wanted toknow what it could do visually. He saw uses for new technology that the inventors could not have imagined.” Bing McGilvray
I’m honoured that a portrait David made of me one morning in the ’90s at his house in Los Angeles and sent to Bing at Tower Records in Boston is featured in the Manship Arts Residency exhibition. The portrait hangs alongside fax portraits of David’s mother Laura, his sister Margaret and his dachshund Stanley.” Joe Simon
The show brings together fax works, posters, photographs, films and drawings. There’s also a programme of conversations and screenings with people close to David and his work including:
26 September — A screening of David Hockney: A Bigger Picture, followed by a remote Q&A with filmmaker Bruno Wollheim.
3 October — Doug Roberts, Hockney dealer, collector and longtime friend, in conversation with Heather Atwood.
7 October — A screening of Secret Knowledge, followed by a Q&A with Bing McGilvray.
David Hockney: Reproduction(s) September 11–October 18, 2026 at Manship Arts Residency, Massachusetts. Find more information here.
