At the age of 88, David Hockney “is enjoying a volcanic burst of late energy”, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Times. Although he now uses a wheelchair, the artist continues to produce paintings at a prodigious pace; and, if anything, his work rate “seems to be accelerating”. Following his hugely popular retrospective in Paris earlier this year, he has returned to London to show off a “delightful and thrilling” selection of new work – under the title “Some Very, Very, Very New Paintings Not Yet Shown in Paris”.
The exhibition testifies to his “extraordinary vitality”. Bringing together interiors, still lifes and portraits, it’s “a blast of fearlessness, innocence and the uninhibited enjoyment of colour”. Hockney has always seemed to look at the world with “childlike curiosity”, and these recent pictures find him returning to life’s simple pleasures with renewed vigour. Whether he’s painting a pair of empty chairs – a nod to van Gogh and a touching tribute to absent sitters – or a display of fruit on a rumpled tablecloth in a Smarties-style palette, his colours “pop about with all the fun of a birthday party”.
Any Hockney show is worth visiting, said Rachel Campbell-Johnston in The Times. This one is no exception; it certainly “has its moments”. A series of drawings of the moon the artist created on his iPad “feel as cool as an eye bath”: playing with the tradition of the nocturne, he “conjures a mood of mysterious serenity”, conveying his wonder at the beauty of nature through these “shadowy landscapes”.
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Some of his acrylic paintings of furniture are “eye-popping”, all reversed perspective and exuberant colour: “chairs cavort wonkily about empty spaces and bunches of flowers explode like fireworks”. But, for all “the frenzied delight in colour”, they mostly seem like pale imitations of his greatest hits; the excitement “has vanished from paintings that look as if they’ve been dashed off in an afternoon”.
“The portraits are where this show fails the hardest,” said Eddy Frankel in The Guardian. Hockney now takes a pointillist approach to skin tones, “and the result is a bunch of bodies that look as if they’re covered in sores”: they seem more like “fresh corpses” than living humans. The exception is a self-portrait in which we see the artist painting from his wheelchair; the painting works “because it’s so vulnerable but also so funnily self-aware”. You can’t help but dwell on mortality here: where Hockney was once so assured, his brushstrokes now look “shockingly unsteady”, the compositions frequently verging on the chaotic.
Yet they couldn’t have come from another hand, and it’s oddly “affecting” to see one of the great artists of our time ageing before our eyes. We’ve seen a lot of Hockney exhibitions lately. Perhaps we don’t really need another one. Still, these new works, with their “wobbles” and colour and humour, “prove that he’s still at it, and he’s still got it, all these years later”.
Annely Juda Fine Art, London W1. Until 28 February
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