Magali Robathan pays a visit to David Hockney Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away)
I visited on a Tuesday afternoon a couple of months after the exhibition launched and it was very busy. The 50 minute-long film is on a loop, meaning you can join at any time, and visitors arrive and leave throughout. The atmosphere is very relaxed, with small children wandering around, people standing, sitting and lying back on the floor – I found watching visitors’ reactions almost as interesting as the show itself.
The film is divided into six ‘chapters,’ travelling through Hockney’s life from LA to Yorkshire, and finishing with paintings of his present day home in Normandy, France. For me, the section about his early life and his gleeful reaction to Los Angeles were the most exciting, with the huge projections of his swimming pool paintings working particularly well. There’s also a brilliant section of film with Hockney driving through the Santa Monica hills playing a soundtrack of Wagner with the bends in the road carefully timed to match the music. It’s thrilling and feels as though you’re in the car with him.
Some of the reviews of the exhibition have been a bit sniffy, with critics arguing that it lacks passion and is not ‘real art’.
For me that misses the point – of course it’s a different experience to viewing Hockney’s paintings in real life, but I found it visually spectacular and his commentary made it enlightening and surprisingly moving.
Something about hearing the artist talk about his life, while watching his art through the years play out in such an immersive setting really stayed with me, and I found myself resolving to look at the world more closely, and appreciate the beauty all around.
"I found it visually spectacular and his commentary made it enlightening and surprisingly moving"
