Get up close and personal with the minute details found in David Hockney's masterpieces
It might read like a paradox but, in the art world, there is no question that David Hockney is a towering Goliath. As Sir Norman Rosenthal, the great British writer and curator, notes, “He is one of the spectacular ones — varied, inventive, consistent.” Fans of the Yorkshire-born artist, meanwhile, have their 2025 cultural calendar practically laid out on a silver platter for them. The Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris is currently hosting David Hockney 25, his largest exhibition to date, comprising over 400 works from 1955 to the present, and which occupies 11 rooms in the Frank Gehry-designed building. Those with shorter attention spans or time constraints, however, would do better to visit David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away), happening now at the Lightroom in King’s Cross’ Coal Drops Yard in London, and the creativity gallery of the West Bund Museum in Shanghai, China.
Suitable for the artistically inclined and experience seeker alike, just one hour of your time is needed for the latter. Taking over three years to create and overseen by the artist himself, Bigger & Closer also marks the master’s first immersive digital exhibition. Through the use of large-scale projection accompanied by personal narration and a specially composed score by Nico Muhly, interspersed with bouts of opera (namely Das Rheingold by Wagner), visitors are offered the unprecedented opportunity to literally “plunge” themselves into Hockney’s world — from being a “backseat passenger” as he trundles up the San Gabriel Mountains to almost feeling the Californian sun on your skin the moment larger-than-life images of his iconic 1966 Beverly Hills Housewife or the inviting blue of an Angeleno swimming pool light up the entire space.
You would hardly notice the minutes ticking away as you journey through a cycle of six distinct, themed chapters: from Los Angeles to Woldgate in East Yorkshire and up to the present day in Normandy, France, in the company of David and his coterie of friends, who include textile designer Celia Birtwell, art dealer and collector John Kasmin who first “discovered” Hockney in the Sixties and, of course, the (in)famous Gregory Evans, the artist’s longtime friend, erstwhile lover and frequent model who loved to swim in the nude.
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All of this is guaranteed catnip for a population insatiably hungry for experiences. The huge success of Japan’s teamLab animated projections; the French-based L’Atelier des Lumières; The Lume in Melbourne, Australia’s first fully immersive digital-art gallery; or the phenomenon that is Refik Anadol’s abstract data visualisations turned art, testify to the inescapable truth that digitisation has become part and parcel of everyday life, even if just for the short-lived thrill of a TikTok post.
Purists will undoubtedly posit pompously how a single visit to the digital retrospective will not result in the significant enrichment of one’s artistic knowledge. But given how Hockney’s art — and there is staggering breadth and depth to it — has always centred around human relationships, 60 joyous minutes enveloped by light, music and colour is as pleasing, if not more, than one hour spent intellectually dissecting the hidden messages behind multilayered image matrices or debating the influence Picasso wielded on the 23-year-old David who, as a first year student at the Royal College of Art, attended a monumental exhibition by the Spanish legend at the Tate Gallery. As Robert Hughes, once dubbed “the most famous art critic in the world”, opined: “To think of Hockney is to think of pictorial skill and a total indifference (in the work, at least) to the dark side of human experience. Does the latter make him a less serious painter? Of course not.”
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So, do not miss a lengthy immersion at the Fondation Louis Vuitton if such an opportunity arises. A day at David Hockney 25 will, no doubt, leave you enlightened on the reasons the fourth of Kenneth and Laura Hockney’s five children left industrial Bradford to study art in London or perhaps even be moved to tears, as The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones was. “Hockney reminds us how beautiful the world is,” he enthused in his column. But, however, should chance land you in London, or even Shanghai, do not miss a quick date with the artist either. No one doubts his greatness. Already 88, he continues to experiment and explore, ever curious and in awe of the world that surrounds him, using his inimitable way of visual storytelling to create a bridge that blurs the lines between cognoscenti and the common man.
As digitisation keeps on democratising art, it is clear that visiting a gallery or an exhibition today is as much about the hunt for social media fodder as it is about feeding one’s soul. Whatever the inclination (or motive), Hockney himself never eschewed technological innovations in his creative process, toying around with classic photographic and Polaroid cameras, before moving on to digital drawing devices like the camera lucida, iPads and iPhones as well as Xerox copiers, fax machines and the Quantel Paintbox, an early digital painting system. In fact, he once mused how “the history of pictures begins in the caves and ends, at the moment, with an iPad. Who knows where it will go next? But one thing is certain — the pictorial problems will always be there — the difficulties of depicting the world in two dimensions are permanent. Meaning you never solve them”.
Perhaps Danish author, theologian and philosopher Søren Kierkegaard interprets the conundrum best, saying, “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.” Digitally imagined or otherwise.
David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away) is on until June 29 at Lightroom London and until Nov 30 at the West Bund Museum, Shanghai. To buy tickets and for more information, see here.
This article first appeared on May 19, 2025 in The Edge Malaysia.
