The New Britain Museum of American Art presents special exhibition David Hockney & James Sellars: Haplomatics from December 13, 2024, through October 5, 2025.
David Hockney & James Sellars: Haplomatics explores the wild realm of pseudo-scientific fantasy in the visual textual and musical collaboration between the artist David Hockney and the composer James Sellars.
Their work together in the late 1980s became a synergy of art, technology, and music that resulted in a multi-media masterpiece, the animated film Haplomatics. The film introduces a genus of abstract beings called Haplomes, which come to life through Hockney’s prints and Sellars’s narration and innovative musical score. Haplomatics, the exhibition, features Hockney’s innovations in printmaking with the thirty-five xerographic prints that were used to create the film’s visual effects. Drawn from the collection of the New Britain Museum of American Art, Hockney’s xerographs will be displayed alongside the complete film for its first public debut.
When Gary Knoble, a dedicated member of the NBMAA Board of Trustees, retells the origin story of Haplomatics, we realize it is actually a love story of companionship, music, language, and laughter—64 years in the making. Knoble and James Sellar were life companions from 1960 until Sellar’s death in 2017. Knoble reflected on Sellar’s passion for words and the sense of humor he combined to create this project, which began as a spoof on a college lecture.
“To finally present this exhibition to the public after all these years is an unbelievable celebration,” says Knoble. “We are able to give James a gift in recognition of his extremely important work. There’s nothing else like it in this world or in the art world.”
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue, Haplomatics: An Automated Techno-Fantasy by James Sellars and David Hockney by Thomas Schuttenhelm (Hirmer Publications, forthcoming 2024). The book will serve as a companion to the exhibition and provide insight and access to a rare yet significant work. In addition to reproducing the Hockney Haplomes and the full text of Haplomatics, the book will provide a detailed chronicle of the collaboration between Sellars and Hockney and describe the intersectional ties that exist between the text, music, images, and the animated video. The publication can function as an introduction and handbook for Haplomatics, an exhibition booklet, and a micro-biography of the era and the artists.
Credit: Art Daily
