An Immersive London Exhibition Lets You Step Inside David Hockney’s Best-Loved Paintings

The most surprising section, though, is dedicated to the artist’s numerous set designs for opera, “Hockney Paints the Stage.” Here, we get less familiar work, primarily from the late 1970s and 1980s, completely illuminated by music and movement: Parade, Le Rossignol, Turandot, The Magic Flute, and Tristan und Isolde, from which a stage boat is projected on all sides, sails billowing and waves crashing. “The amount of people who have seen all the operas I’ve done is very, very small,” Hockney said. “When I took it on, I never treated it as a side issue; I did my best at it.”

The impression is that all mediums are equally important for Hockney: his operas, his paintings, his videos, and even his 1985 portfolio for Vogue France, which also makes a cameo in Bigger & Closer (and which, no coincidence, also covered the subject of perspective). “When it came out, a lot of people just didn’t get it, really. Didn’t get quite was I was talking about. I didn’t care. I thought, well, in the future they might. Well, it’s here now, isn’t it? It’s arrived.” 

Before our interview, Hockney sent over a 2012 essay he first published in The Financial Times, which positioned technology as a source of hope for artists, at the time referencing new devices such as iPhones and iPads. The implication was that the same was true of the innovations Lightroom offers. Asked what he thought of artists using artificial intelligence, Hockney replied, “In that essay, I just noticed that I’d say there’d be some chaos before things are sorted out, and someone will come along and sort things out. Now we’re in this period of chaos.” It’s hard not to wonder what Hockney would do with Dall-E. 

The easy criticism of Bigger & Closer, however it’s phrased, will be that it’s overly approachable. In fact, this is the show’s deepest strength. It pulls a six-decade career into the present and future and, because it requires no museum loans, could easily travel or run in multiple locations simultaneously. It is an impossible retrospective, the kind that uses existing works to make new ones. One hopes it will inspire other artists to experiment in other mediums and technologies with more confidence. David Hockney, of course, has nothing to prove, and so is fearless, but the art world as a whole has everything to gain from his kind of open-mindedness. It turns out that “immersive” can work, if you allow it.