David Hockney Bigger & Closer exhibition review, Lightroom, London UK

Viewers are engulfed by images on every side and even underfoot

(Image credit: Lightroom/Facebook)

published 3 March 2023

David Hockney “has always been obsessed” with new technology, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. Over his seven-decade career, he has made work using everything from fax machines to Polaroid cameras to iPads – and now, aged 85, the “Croc-wearing, chain-smoking, hedonistic populist” is at it again. Lightroom, a “cavernous” new subterranean venue in King’s Cross, is presenting Hockney’s latest gambit, Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away): an “immersive” spectacle involving “massive projections” and “high-end audio”.

David Hockney and Martin Gayford on the history of pictures

While similar experiences dedicated to painters including Klimt and van Gogh have largely proved insubstantial and unsatisfactory, the artist’s own effort is an “astonishing venture”. Images are “projected onto enormous screens”, engulfing the viewer on every side and even underfoot, with huge, hi-tech digital recreations of Hockney’s paintings. All the while, he provides an in-depth commentary, his voice booming out “as if he were Jehovah rumbling commandments from on high”. Purists may grumble – arguably this is more “akin to drive-in cinema” than an art exhibition – but this is “a coup of entertainment: accessible, affecting and, technically, executed with panache”.

The hour-long experience is divided into four “chapters” that explore different aspects of Hockney’s career, said Ben Luke in the Evening Standard. Some of these are more successful than others: a section on his stage designs is “genuinely brilliant”, vividly evoking “stirring” creations such as the ship he designed for a performance of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. However, there’s too much that “disappoints and irritates”. Throughout, Hockney’s voiceover reminds us of the importance of close observation – something made impossible here by the “relentless movement” of the visuals: a sequence devoted to his sketchbooks, for instance, provides only glimpses of some beautiful drawings and watercolours. Worse still, the whole thing is punctuated by his “wretched” iPad drawings, which are especially “ropey” blown up to this scale.

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There are some diverting moments, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. At one point, we find the artist driving through California “blaring” Wagner from his stereo, “each bend in the mountain road timed to the music’s unfurling sublimity”. “You feel as if you are in the open-top car with him.” A section on his experiments with “cubistic photography” is “eye-opening”; and it’s always nice to see his famous paintings of Los Angeles swimming pools. Yet nothing here can compete with “a brief glance at an actual original work of art by Hockney in a gallery”. In his innocence, the artist has “lent his fame” to “a dumb contemporary fad” that cannot “capture the beauty of his art”. It’s an experience that should be consigned to “the weightless, passionless dustbin of forgetting”.