David Hockney's 'Bigger and closer...' exhibition - a writer's review

Hockney – give him his flowers

I love Hockney and I hate him. I went to see his Bigger and Closer exhibition at Aviva Studios. True to form, his art there shines with joy, brightness, playfulness and innovation. It’s not ordinary oil-on-canvas paintings. Instead, it’s a giant light show. Film and images are channelled onto four giant screens that scroll through his work in fifty minutes – landscapes, his opera backdrops, his California evocations: it all rolls over us -sometimes even showing him in the act of creation. As we watch we are piped classical music else Hockney’s own, rolled Yorkshire voice provides commentary. I went with my nonagenarian mother, and…

…initially she was irritated. Where are the proper paintings? she asked. She has a point. We lose the ability to pause where we want, to examine a particular element at the speed we want, to obsess over some detail or other. Instead, at Aviva, we march to Hockney’s chosen beat. I realise that, with the disembodied voice and the huge scale artworks, Hockney here is God and we are in Hockney’s church – this viewing chamber is like an Evangelist tent for Hockney worshippers, pitched up at Aviva. We crane our necks, gawp at the friezes as the disembodied God, Hockney himself, delivers sermons on how to view art, what his art means. The collection plate (tickets £24) has already gone round and shucked the shillings out of each of us (there are concessionary prices too*). The choir is the raised viewing platform within the chamber. They don’t sing, just look down on us lesser beings as we sprawl on the floor else sag in our fold-out chairs and benches, or prop up the walls.

Hockney radiates sunshine. Born in Yorkshire, he escaped the driving Yorkshire rain (unlike his doom-mongering Yorkshire compatriot, the poet, Ted Hughes and the equally bleak, trapped-in-Hebden Bridge poet, Sylvia Plath). Hockney slipped away to California in 1964 when he was in his late twenties, and hit all that Cali sun and light and blue swimming pools, and loved it and you can see that love in the art.

Bigger and Closer showcases Aviva Studio’s excellence at huge, immersive installation art – where else in the Northern England can you put this bright cinematic four-screen show the height of two double decker buses? You know too, how adverts come at you at higher volume and in brighter colours? Same here with Hockney.

I was enlightened by some of Hockney’s voice-over analysis. For instance, he points out how Chinese paintings employ multiple perspectives unlike singular Western perspective techniques, and he incorporates this into his art; this observation helped me understand some of the fascination I have with Hockney’s work – I have a print of his on my wall — it’s partly how he shifts perspectives within a painting so that ‘you don’t just view them you walk through them,’ to paraphrase Hockney himself.

A dream of Hockney

Good art stays with you. The night after visiting the exhibition, I had a dream of Hockney. He came to Aviva to be interviewed by me. I know he is deaf now and would be lip-reading. In the dream, I was at Aviva with one of my daughters and about to interview him when the lights went down for a film screening by some professor. I quickly approached the professor and explained. She laughed and agreed to bring the lights back up but by now Hockney had wandered off with my daughter to do the interview elsewhere. I’m trying to ring my daughter to tell her to record it, but she’s unreachable and I know she’s having a whale of a time with Hockney. What does all this mean? I don’t know.

The Salford-Manchester Hockney corridor

Next day, still under the influence of loving Hockney, I was in a taxi going from Salford to Manchester and kept G.L.I.M.P.S.I.N.G. brilliantly** bright lcd advertising hoardings through the rain — the hoardings were being made to flicker by the speed of the car and the foreground of leafless, young Winter trees planted in Salford roadside verges — the effect was totally Hockney — the illumination, the flickering, the colour — I realised it would take a hacker ten minutes to reprogram all the hoardings. Then everyone across Salford and Manchester could jump in a car and drive through the Hockney exhibition for free!

Hockney, Walker and Basquiat

By night, I’d flipped and I was hating Hockney. For his erasures. There were no black people in his exhibition: we were not ‘seen’ by Hockney. I contrasted this to the Barbara Walker exhibition, (‘Being here’ at Whitworth, 4 October 2024 – 26 January 2025)*** and I imagined the Walker exhibition all neon-ed up, scaled up and transferred to Aviva. We are seen by Walker. Totally. We are seen by Basquiat - even if his seeing is through his mirror. And this is why I hate Hockney. He never sees non-white people. I’m thinking, Jeez, he never takes any political stand, does he? What if Hockney suddenly clenched his fist and said, “Black lives matter!” Wouldn’t that be great? But he’s a no-politics painter. That’s a choice. There’s a sixteen -panel Gilbert and George back-lit artwork at the Whitworth gallery in Manchester of a young black man. That’s a choice. Hockney by contrast — or at least all the Hockney I’ve seen so far — has no black people in his visions, whether those visions are of Yorkshire — with its significant Asian population, or of California — even though the state of California is now two thirds non-white. It’s a very white Christmas viewing the David Hockney show.

‘Cut him some slack, he is of his time,’ my friend chides me when I voice this.

‘But we’re always cutting slack. How much slack is too much?’

There’s silence.

My thoughts jump track and I’m reminded (but don’t voice) my wariness at the recent Salford Lads Club PR campaign, their dubious embrace of key patron, Morrisey with all Morrisey’s Anti -Immigrant ick; nobody mentions this publicly, but do black kids feel comfortable visiting that place given Salford Lads Clubs’ ‘High Church of Morrisey’ positioning? I’m unsure. Applying the same thinking, can we as black people be comfortable viewing Hockney when, as Barbara Walker points out through her exhibition — it’s the very bones of her exhibition — we are constantly being erased? True, Hockney is aesthetically experimental – his iPad innovation, the big screens, all the tech stuff that upsets my mum, I love all that. Yet.

‘Yet socially, he is conservative, nuh?’ is what I finally reply.

“That’s harsh,” my friend rejoins.

“But it’s not unreasonable, or petty?”

“You don’t know his entire opus. He may have loads of works that are of non-white people. You’re jumping to conclusions.”

“Name one.”

She brushed this away. “They will be there. Besides, he’s a gay artist and openly so, he’s put that into his art. That’s progress. It took courage in his time to be out like that. He can’t be expected to do all the heavy lifting.”

I could hear a slight hesitation in her voice.

“And yet?”

She brushed the hesitation away. “No, don’t judge. Hockney is adorable. Give him his flowers. All that joy and light and brilliance. Do we not all need to be bathed in such joyous light from time to time?”

I laugh and concede that’s true. And I’m aware my mother wants a print of one of his paintings to hang on her wall and is prepared to serve him salami and cheese if he visits her. I suspect Hockney would even make it into my mum’s hallowed front room, she’s that much of a fan. And anybody who makes my mum smile is fine with me. Hockney. I hate him, I love him.

*reminds me of the way churchgoers used to do that particular ‘hide’ manoeuvre with their palms when dropping small money into the brass-and velvet collection plate (God Bless You), while their neighbour, the wealthy worshipper, drops paper money, ostentatiously).

**brilliant as in the French verb, briller – to shine, so a bright, sharp light.

*** my review of the Barbara Walker exhibition is here: Barbara Walker 'Being here' exhibition review