Don’t get me wrong, David Hockney deserves huge admiration. He is a superlative draughtsman and exuberant colourist. His best-known images — those Californian swimming pools, for example — capture the spirit of a time and a place. His eager adoption of new technologies — first Polaroid, fax and photocopier, now digital media — speaks of his spirit of optimistic vitality. Famously Hockney is an exceptionally nice man.
Little wonder that Annely Juda Fine Art chose this octogenarian to inaugurate the magnificent new premises to which it has just moved at 16 Hanover Square in London. David Hockney: Some Very, Very, Very New Paintings Not Yet Shown in Paris, squeezed in between a phenomenally successful retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris and a forthcoming exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London (from next March), debuts a selection of Hockney’s most recent paintings alongside the first full presentation in this country of his iPad images of nocturnal landscapes.
Pieces of furniture may not sound like promising subject matter but in the eye-popping acrylics hung in the downstairs galleries, chairs cavort wonkily about empty spaces and bunches of flowers explode like fireworks; pattern runs amok in domestic interiors; collages play tricks with painterly views.
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Not every picture by David Hockney should be fawned over
SARAH M LEE
Delphiniums on My Garden Table, July 2025
JONATHAN WILKINSON
Hockney dazzles and discombobulates. In his lifelong quest to capture the sensation of how we truly see, he turns the tables (often, in this case, quite literally) on traditional linear perspective so that instead of imagined lines converging towards a vanishing point on the horizon, they diverge, sweeping outwards, engulfing the eye. But the visual argument will be familiar to any Hockney fan. He’s been banging this drum for decades. For all the frenzied delight in colour, the excitement of novelty has vanished from paintings that look as if they’ve been dashed off in an afternoon.
Upstairs, the moon works — created in 2020 as Hockney drew on an iPad outside his Normandy studio — feel as cool as an eye bath after the blaze. Playing with the tradition of the nocturne, Hockney conjures a mood of mysterious serenity. Shadowy landscapes convey his sense of wonder at the beauty of nature, in much the same way that his images of spring blossoms breaking like spume over hedgerows did. But the luminosity of the backlit screen is lost in the process of printing. Images on paper capture only a faded afterglow.
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At the hang of his latest exhibiton
SARAH M LEE
For those who prize Hockney’s early portraits — his iconic Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, for instance — his later prawn-pink renditions of family and friends feel second rate. I bet if, back in the Sixties, his dealer Kasmin had been presented with the portrait that Hockney now paints of him, he would never have offered him a first show.
Some late-period artists enjoy a sudden great flourishing. Hockney’s more than 60-year career has followed an alternative trajectory. Like Picasso (whom he hails as a major influence) he has reinvented himself over and over instead. His efforts have deservedly made him our nation’s most famous living artist. But however enticingly familiar a vision, that doesn’t mean that every picture should be fawned over.
Any Hockney show is worth visiting. This one — especially the two moon rooms — has its moments. A few works are for sale. If you want to buy a memento of a modern-day legend then fill your boots. But it will be a commercial souvenir of something far more original and striking. There is everything to admire about Hockney — except some of his latest works.
★★★☆☆
David Hockney: Some Very, Very, Very New Paintings Not Yet Shown in Paris, Nov 7 until Feb annelyjudafineart.co.uk