Galleria Lucio Amelio, Naples

Yves-Marie Hervé, a student of Art History at  L’Ecole du Louvre, met David Hockney when the artist was living in Paris between 1973 and 1975.  The two became close friends, often visiting the Louvre together. Yves Marie Asleep shows Yves-Marie lying next t🌸o a swimming pool in the South of France in 1974. 

After a visit to Los Angeles in the mid-1960s, Hockney began using the swimming pool as a frequent motif in both paintings and photographs, seizing not only on the common understanding of the pool as a status symbol and cultural touchstone but also on the metaph✃orical and symbolic nature of water itself.

Hockney’s first used his photographic images as references for paintings, and by early 1982, the photographs he had taken filled roughly 120 albums.  To Hockney, these were merely 'scrap-books of travel memories plus ideas for paintings, nothing more than that' (David Webb, Portrait of David Hockney, p. 201).  In 1976, Ileana Sonnabend showed Twenty Photographic Pictures at Sonnabend Gallery, marking the first time any of Hockney’s photographs were ever shown in a gallery setting. Following Hockney’s debut  at Sonnabend൩, the Centre Pompidou, Par♊is, and the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris both presented exhibitions of Hockney’s photographs.