David Hockney as you’ve never seen him

It is the first ever exhibition at the London Lightroom, a former theater in King’s Cross converted into a contemporary art centre. It’s called David Hockney. Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away), multisensory show fruit of three years of work by David Hockney precisely, painter, engraver, photographer and set designer.

Born in Bradford, England in ’37, he moved to Los Angeles in ’63. In his career he has produced over 8,000 works, has participated in over 500 group exhibitions and 400 solo exhibitions. In the City, from January 25 to April 23, brings his first immersive exhibitionor six giant works projected onto the immense and very high walls of space and accompanied by an incredible soundtrack, dedicated to the American composer Nico Muhly and by the artist’s voice.

The exhibition is a journey through the places so loved by Hockney, with the work At Bigger Grand Canyon of 1998, it starts from Arizona to then arrive in England with The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate East Yorkshire. The latter, in particular, is from 2011 and is made up of 12 inkjet prints taken from drawings created with the iPad, evidence of David Hockney’s tireless curiosity: it is since 2009 that he experiments with new techniques and resorts to technology. «I don’t know how I see colour, but I see it and I like it», he says himself to describe the method used with the touch-screen tablet, a sort of digital notebook.

On display there is also Gregory Swimming Los Angeles March 31st 1982, photographic collage of Polaroid snapshots where one of the artist’s favorite settings reappears: the swimming pools. Many of his paintings from the 1960s and 1970s have the blue waters of Los Angeles houses as backdrops. What is surprising is that it is a Yorkshireman to reveal the details of California in a way not even a Californian could.

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