3 hours ago
5
He’s still at it, is David Hockney. At 88 years old, and more than 60 years into a career that has seen him rise to the very top of the contemporary art pile, Hockney is still painting, still experimenting, still innovating, and still having shows.
This exhibition – the first in a swish ultra-central London location for Annely Juda, his gallery since the 1990s – is packed with paintings so new you can almost smell the wet paint. The opening room is all eye-searingly bright still lifes: chairs, tables, fruit and flowers. It’s the most old-fashioned and staid of subject matter, but nothing Hockney does is that dull, is it?
His Van Gogh-y wicker chairs are neon yellow and luminous purple; his floors are clashing compositions of red, yellow and orange shapes; his fruit is all primary and basic and childlike. Throughout, he toys with what he calls “reverse perspective”, an attempt to replicate how we actually see the world, not the static view of life we get in photographs and other paintings. So everything looks wobbly and twisted. His chair legs splay, his tablecloths warp. I don’t think it’s any closer to “real” perspective than traditional painting, but the woozy visual discomfort it creates is fun. Photos of gardens are pasted into some of the compositions – little glimpses of a somewhat dull English reality that just make the rest of each work feel brighter and sunnier.
What you can’t really avoid is how much shakier these brush marks are than they used to be. Classic Hockney is so assured, so in command of his paintbrush, but these new works are almost shockingly unsteady. The brush marks are full of quivers and tremors, the lines are all over the shop, bits of white underpainting poke out everywhere. They’re almost a mess, but still immediately, uniquely and recognisably him. It makes for quite an emotional, affecting experience – we’re watching one of the great artists of modern times age in front of our eyes. Compare all this with the very early works on display in another show earlier this year and it almost starts to feel like bookends of a career, and I’m not sure I’m ready to handle that level of morbidity, actually.
The portraits are where this show fails the hardest though. Hockney’s approach to skin tone has edged more towards pointillism over the years and the result is a bunch of bodies that look as if they’re covered in sores. All the figures here are splotchy, red-faced and pockmarked, splodged with pink and red (except for poor John Kasmin who seems to have gone a bit mouldy and gangrenous). The figures are closer to fresh corpses than living beings with heartbeats and vitality. A triple portrait of a man in a mirror is a good idea, but he just looks like a bloke awkwardly waiting for his wife outside the John Lewis changing rooms. Only the self-portrait here, showing Hockney painting in a wheelchair, really works, and that’s because it’s so vulnerable, but also so funnily self-aware.
Upstairs, Hockney continues his iPad experiments with a series of “paintings” of the moon; all dark and moody, big glowing orbs hovering above blackened landscapes. They feel quiet, austere, maybe a little sad. I won’t hear any whingeing about his iPad work – people complain about the lack of texture and brush marks and humanity and yadda yadda yadda, but to my mind they’re great – an artist bending new technology to his will, showing that whatever the medium, he still maintains all the hallmarks of his aesthetic.
But look, do we really need yet another Hockney exhibition? There have been more than 10 shows of his work in London in the last eight or nine years alone, not to mention the giant retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris earlier this year, and this new exhibition isn’t even the last of it. The Serpentine is doing a big one in 2026, too. I love Hockney, but even I think enough might just be enough.
And yet, I guess we should celebrate him while we can. Here, with all these new works with their wobbles and humour and light and colour, he’s just proving that he’s still at it, and he’s still got it, all these years later.
