Bigger and Closer

Lavish immersive digital experiences that provide a retrospective of an artist’s career are now something of a genre. They travel the world as blockbuster art experiences, somewhat “superficial and generally without any of the original art on site”.

The hugely successful Dali and Van Gogh shows may hold the record for sales but straight in at number one for creative quality is the latest entrant. There is a crucial, transformational, aspect to it: the artist is alive. David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller and further away) saw its 85-year-old subject intensely involved in the planning and production of the show, now at the new Lightroom in London’s King Cross, a large box of a space lined with 12 m / 39 ft high screen walls and a pioneering sound system. Years of development between Hockney and the creatives at 59 Productions led to this spectacular show, which can itself count as a collaborative artwork, enabling Hockney to offer a non-chronological, thematic journey through how he thinks about and makes art. Seeing his iPad images being created as giant wall animations, hearing new and archival commentary by Hockney, being suffused in the brilliant colors … it’s quite a heady brew. As somebody who has regularly embraced different technologies across his career, it should be no great surprise that Hockney has taken this step.