Paintings

David Hockney’s paintings offer several different pleasures: the sudden white burst of a splash, two people sharing a room, a road twisting across a hillside, or branches spreading across a wall of canvases. Their recognisable subjects can make the changes between them seem less radical than they are. Hockney continually reconsidered the materials, marks and arrangements through which a picture could give an experience of the world. A handwritten word, an unmodulated field of acrylic blue and a thickly painted tree each brought something different to that task. The Metropolitan Museum’s retrospective in 2017 placed his experiments with abstraction, illusion, realism and landscape within this sustained investigation of movement, space and time. ^[1]

Following those changes gives a fuller understanding of his painting than treating the swimming pools as a signature formula. His early pictures made desire explicit through writing and deliberately unstable styles. The pools turned transparency into a problem of coloured marks. Double portraits tested the relationship between bodily presence and pictorial construction. Later landscapes stretched the canvas into a field through which the eye could travel. Oil painting, acrylic painting, drawing, photography and digital work repeatedly overlapped. Their exchanges helped painting develop, while the canvas remained a place to pursue questions that another medium had opened.

Words, figures and the freedom to change style

At the Royal College of Art, Hockney briefly tried the abstract painting favoured by many of the students he considered adventurous. He wanted to participate in contemporary art, but he also wanted to introduce the human figure and subjects that mattered to him. Writing provided a way through that difficulty. Words could direct an otherwise ambiguous arrangement towards love, sex or a particular person without requiring a conventionally modelled body. His reading of Walt Whitman informed the love paintings of 1960, and Adhesiveness used numbers corresponding to initials to connect its interpenetrating figures with Hockney and Whitman. Hockney subsequently described it as an early attempt at a double portrait. ^[2]

The marks in these paintings have several jobs. A passage of handwriting is part of the painted surface, but it also asks to be read. That changes the viewer’s distance and pace: a picture that first registers as large shapes can require a closer encounter with something small and personal. The Third Love Painting (1960), made in oil on Masonite, belongs to this productive border between an abstract arrangement and a declaration. Hockney’s own account emphasised how its graffiti drew the viewer towards the surface. Its human content did not depend on transforming every area of paint into an identifiable object. ^{[3] [2]}

The early pictures consequently demand a more flexible understanding of representation than a division between realistic and abstract art allows. A word can identify a feeling without illustrating it; a number can stand for a person; a loosely formed body can make contact between people tangible. These devices also give private experience a public form. The paintings’ references to male desire belong to their structure and language. They explain why a letter, a suggestive contour or a coded name could carry such weight within an apparently unruly surface.

Picasso offered another kind of permission. Hockney saw the major Tate exhibition in 1960, and the example of an artist able to work in widely different manners strengthened his resistance to a single compulsory style. At the 1962 Young Contemporaries exhibition he grouped four paintings as Demonstrations of Versatility. As the Tate and Musée Granet guide explains, consciously choosing a manner, or allowing several manners to coexist, became part of the work itself. A painting’s style could be a decision made in relation to its subject. ^[4]

The titles make the experiment unusually visible. Tea Painting in an Illusionistic Style (1961) identifies an effect it is trying out, while Flight into Italy—Swiss Landscape (Painting in a Scenic Style) (1962) treats landscape as something that can be staged through a chosen convention. Both are oils on canvas, as is The First Marriage (A Marriage of Styles I) (1962). The subject and the method of representing it become simultaneous concerns. The viewer is invited to recognise an image and notice the pictorial language that has made recognition possible. ^[3]

The sharper architectural spaces and more continuous bodies of the subsequent California paintings developed within this freedom to change the rules. Naturalism would become another choice, available when it served a particular picture.

Acrylic, California and the changing surface of water

Hockney arrived in Los Angeles in 1964 and established a home and studio in Santa Monica. His first painting there, Plastic Tree Plus City Hall, used acrylic, a change of material that accompanied the change of environment. The Foundation chronology connects the new surroundings with his first swimming-pool paintings and bold treatments of the Southern Californian landscape. Acrylic would become central to many of the pictures through which he explored the city’s architecture, bodies, light and water. ^[5]

The pools presented a particularly testing subject. Water is visible through its depth, movement, reflections and the things it distorts, yet none of those qualities supplies a fixed outline or local colour. Matthew Sperling’s Apollo essay identifies the variety of Hockney’s responses: patches of interlocking colour in Picture of a Hollywood Swimming Pool (1964), white linear movements in Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool and Sunbather (both 1966), and the almost abstract possibilities of falling water in Different Kinds of Water Pouring into a Swimming Pool, Santa Monica (1965). Each required a different vocabulary. ^[6]

That variety is important when looking at a familiar Hockney pool. A line on blue paint may describe a reflection, but it also remains an emphatic line; a patchwork of shapes can suggest the changing appearance of water without behaving like a transparent window. The subject makes the act of depiction conspicuous. We recognise liquid through arrangements that could otherwise belong to an abstract painting. The pool’s containing edges establish a firm geometry, allowing the unstable marks within it to appear especially mobile.

The surrounding domestic setting gave this formal investigation a human scale. A pool was a place where a body could be seen at rest, climbing out or moving underwater. Its architectural boundaries also turned it into a kind of outdoor room. Sperling relates the paintings to the erotic and domestic possibilities that California offered Hockney, while stressing the technical challenge that water increasingly presented. Desire, a place to live and a problem in painting could occupy the same rectangle. The figure and the surface were connected subjects. ^[6]

In A Bigger Splash (1967), the relationship between movement and stillness becomes exceptionally concentrated. The painting is acrylic on canvas, nearly two and a half metres high and wide. The rigid poolside architecture makes the erupted water seem more irregular, while the diver’s disappearance leaves an event to be inferred from its effects. Its subject is already over, yet its painted trace continues to command attention. Hockney’s own account set the long labour of painting against the tiny interval occupied by a real splash. The contradiction between making time and depicted time is central to the picture’s force. ^{[3] [7]}

A Lawn Being Sprinkled (1967) brings water into a different relationship with the built landscape. Here the subject is the repeated action of irrigation, and the lawn provides a surface across which water can make a pattern. The Foundation pairs it with A Bigger Splash in discussing Hockney’s growing resourcefulness with liquid, reflective and transparent effects. Repetition replaces the single eruption as the organising idea. These are related investigations with different pictorial rhythms. ^{[7] [3]}

Across the group, the pool can be a plane, a pattern, a depth and a setting for bodies. Hockney’s broader style and techniques developed through that willingness to let the chosen subject determine how marks would function.

Double portraits: people and the spaces between them

From the late 1960s, large double portraits offered another demanding structure. Two figures introduce several relationships at once: between each sitter and the painter, between the sitters, and between their bodies and the room or garden. The paintings often approach the scale of an encounter with actual people. Their breadth gives furniture, objects and empty intervals room to contribute. The setting becomes part of how a portrait works, even when it supplies no definite story about what its occupants are thinking.

Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy and American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman), both painted in acrylic in 1968, demonstrate different uses of that structure. Hockney explained that Isherwood habitually looked towards Bachardy when he relaxed, while Bachardy looked towards him, the painter. He retained those different directions of attention in the composition. For the Weismans, he described the surrounding sculptures and the whole setting as part of the portrait. One painting develops from the relation of two gazes; the other extends likeness into an environment of collected objects. ^{[8] [3]}

These differences prevent the double portraits from becoming a sequence of interchangeable social documents. In one, the sitters’ habitual behaviour supplies the arrangement. In another, the things around them enlarge the idea of a portrait beyond facial features. The intervals between bodies matter as much as the bodies themselves: the eye must cross them, and in doing so becomes conscious of the painting’s construction. A pair of people is also a problem in composition, with distances, angles and changes of attention that a single head does not require.

Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1970–71) took that ambition into an interior whose central light source created a difficult tonal problem. Hockney wanted the presence of two nearly life-size people, the fashion designer Ossie Clark and textile designer Celia Birtwell. His account makes clear how much work lay behind the apparent ease: substantial painting from life, studio sittings, repeated alterations and the struggle to organise tones around the bright opening in the middle. The finished picture’s clarity should not be mistaken for a quick or mechanically photographic procedure. ^[9]

The technical issue is also a useful way into the painting. A visible source of daylight has to remain convincing within a surface made entirely of paint. The painter must arrange the surrounding tones so that the light appears to illuminate the room and its occupants. Meanwhile, the scale has to hold the two figures together without making them a single compact group. Hockney linked these difficulties to his wish to paint their relationship. That testimony supports attention to the arrangement, while leaving the sitters’ private feelings open. The painting does not need to become a prediction of the couple’s later history. ^[9]

Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972) combines the pool subject with another two-person arrangement. The standing figure and the underwater swimmer appear in different states of visibility: one clothed, upright and outside the water; the other extended within it. Christie’s documented account of the painting’s making traces its origin to an accidental conjunction of photographs, followed by new pool studies in southern France and separate photographs of Peter Schlesinger in London. The scene is a constructed image assembled through repeated decisions, rather than a record of one observed encounter at a Los Angeles pool. ^[10]

The painting’s coherence depends on making those separate sources work together. It connects a figure viewed through water with another viewed through air, and binds both to the pool’s strict boundaries and the surrounding landscape. The different bodies also extend the early interest in bringing different kinds of representation into one work. Its emotional possibilities remain inseparable from these formal decisions. Knowing the documented process helps us see the labour of joining, arranging and revising that the finished surface makes appear continuous.

The oil painting My Parents (1977) offers a quieter form of doubleness. Laura Hockney sits facing forwards while Kenneth reads, so their attention takes different directions. A reproduction of Piero della Francesca’s The Baptism of Christ also enters its pictorial world, a connection explored by the National Gallery’s 2024 exhibition Hockney and Piero: A Longer Look. Family observation and the observation of paintings meet within the same domestic arrangement. Hockney’s portraits repeatedly make room for both the people he knew and the art through which he continued to think. ^{[11] [12] [13]}

Painting after naturalism

The increasing naturalism of the double portraits brought a difficulty of its own. In her account of Hockney’s 1970s transition, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo curator Ai Kusumoto describes his growing dissatisfaction with the claim that a geometrically consistent, naturalistic image necessarily came closest to lived experience. She connects the changes that followed with several encounters: concentrated drawing in Paris, renewed attention to Picasso through work with the printer Aldo Crommelynck, theatre, and Japanese and Chinese art. In this reading, the development of multiple viewpoints emerged through interlocking experiences and practices. ^[14]

Oil paintings continued through this period of reconsideration. Contre-jour in the French Style (1974), Kerby (after Hogarth) Useful Knowledge (1975) and Looking at Pictures on a Screen (1977) take the problems of illumination, representation and looking into their titles. Their place between the large acrylic double portraits and the 1980s landscapes is consequential. The changing practice did not require the figure or the room to disappear. Familiar subjects remained available while the rules for organising them became open to question. ^[3]

The distinction was between a convincing picture and a complete account of how vision happens. A coherent illusion could still leave out the time spent looking, the movement of the head or the changing attention paid to different objects. Those omissions became productive problems for Hockney. The experience of actual theatrical space and alternative pictorial conventions, in Kusumoto’s account, helped make a stationary view seem one option among others. Painting could reorganise a room or a landscape to acknowledge a more mobile observer. ^[14]

California seen in motion

The acrylic Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio (1980) changes the relation between the viewer and a painted place. More than six metres wide, it organises a journey through Los Angeles into a panoramic field. LACMA describes it as a personalised map based on Hockney’s route from his Hollywood Hills home to his studio on Santa Monica Boulevard. Painted from memory, it alternates identifiable things—houses, trees, tennis courts and power lines—with abstract planes and grids. The road carries the eye across a landscape assembled from different kinds of information. ^[15]

Such a picture has to convey more than what could be seen through a windscreen at a particular second. A remembered journey includes changing altitude, nearby details, distant districts and turns in the road. Those experiences do not arrive at the eye simultaneously, but painting can bring them together. The broad canvas provides room for a succession of attentions. An area of dense detail and an area of simplified colour need not obey the same descriptive rule to participate in a continuous journey.

LACMA identifies the road’s movement across the upper part of the painting with Hockney’s experience of the ridge route. This gives the composition a directional energy without reducing it to a conventional map. Its colours and changes of pattern also make the surface active in its own right. The landscape is both a place to be travelled and an arrangement through which looking can travel. Memory becomes a method of selecting and connecting, retaining the importance of one feature while compressing another. ^[15]

The same year’s Nichols Canyon, also in acrylic, belongs to this renewed concentration on California landscape. Its upright format differs sharply from the expansive horizontal field of Mulholland Drive. Even before considering individual motifs, that difference changes the kind of movement a painting can sustain: the eye negotiates ascent and compression within a tall rectangle, while the panorama allows an extended sweep. Format becomes an active part of the subject. A landscape’s size and proportions can guide an experience as decisively as the objects represented inside it. ^[3]

The reconsideration of space continued indoors. In Large Interior, Los Angeles (1988), oil painting combines with ink on cut-and-pasted paper. The Met connects the room’s fragmented perspective with Cubism and the experience of Chinese scroll paintings, in which looking unfolds across multiple viewpoints and takes time. References to Picasso appear within the pictured interior itself. The living room becomes a place where modern art, the artist’s surroundings and the means of representation can meet, without requiring a single stationary viewing position to explain every part. ^[16]

This material combination is worth taking literally. Paper and ink enter a painting as physical elements, while the depicted space also contains pictures and objects. Hockney could work on the relationship between a surface and an illusion by changing the construction of the surface itself. Hollywood Hills House (1981–82), recorded as oil, charcoal and collage across three canvases, is another reminder of that material breadth. The presence of collage does not automatically make such a work a photographic joiner. These paintings belong to an expanding practice of painting, even when they share questions with his photography. ^[3]

Intimacy, repetition and a return to acrylic

Large landscape experiments coexisted with smaller, more intimate painting. The oils Breakfast at Malibu, Sunday (1989), The Eleventh V. N. Painting and The Twenty Sixth V. N. Painting (both 1992) each measure 24 by 36 inches. Such works complicate any account that sees Hockney’s career as a steady movement towards ever larger pictures. A compact canvas brings the painted object back into close proximity with the viewer. A relatively small format can also hold an ambitious exploration of spatial relationships. ^[3]

The sea opened another line of enquiry at Malibu. The Tate and Musée Granet guide connects the paintings made at his beach house in the early 1990s with the exploration of deep space, alongside small oil portraits of friends and family. The distinction matters within a practice often associated with enclosed pools. The open sea offered a different spatial subject, while the small portraits maintained a close, bounded encounter with a sitter. Expansive space and intimate scale remained concurrent interests. ^[4]

In the 2010s, acrylic supported another sustained return to the person in front of the easel. The paintings gathered as 82 Portraits and 1 Still-life were largely made between 2013 and 2016 in the Hollywood Hills studio. LACMA’s account records a consistent 48-by-36-inch canvas, the same yellow chair and a blue ground adjusted in relation to the sitter’s clothing. The sitters were invited rather than commissioned, and each portrait occupied a concentrated period of sitting. This was a deliberately repeated framework within which differences could become visible. ^[17]

A stable framework changes the work of comparison. When dimensions, chair and general setting recur, the placing of hands, a tilt of the head or the disposition of clothing can register more strongly. The series therefore made continuity a source of variation. Its single still life arose when a sitter rescheduled, according to LACMA, allowing objects to occupy the place temporarily reserved for a person. The shared format connected the genres without making their subjects equivalent. ^[17]

The garden and interior paintings of the same period also returned to acrylic. The 2015 Garden and Garden with Blue Terrace, followed by A Bigger Interior with Blue Terrace and Interior with Blue Terrace and Garden in 2017, place the relationship between inside and outside directly in their titles. The repetition of a terrace across different arrangements makes a familiar setting available for continued invention. Hockney’s later painting could be serial, domestic and analytical at the same time, without depending on a dramatic new destination. ^[3]

Yorkshire: memory becomes sustained observation

The renewed Yorkshire landscapes emerged from repeated contact with a familiar region. During Jonathan Silver’s final illness in 1997, Hockney travelled through the countryside between Bridlington and visits to his friend. The Foundation chronology records how those drives prompted a new body of work. His recollection of the journeys also emphasised agricultural change: growing wheat, harvesting and ploughing continually altered the visible surface of the land. The landscape offered both broad vistas and a subject that would be different when he returned. ^[18]

This combination gave familiarity a practical role. Repeated journeys allow particular turns, groups of trees and fields to become recognisable; they also make alterations easier to notice. A place remembered from childhood was being experienced again through the habits of an artist who had spent decades painting elsewhere. The resulting works carried experience across locations. The California road paintings and the Yorkshire landscapes could share an interest in moving through space even when their climates, vegetation and scale of settlement were very different.

Back in Los Angeles, Hockney continued to paint Yorkshire from memory. Garrowby Hill (1998), an oil painting in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, belongs to this phase. Memory allowed the artist to keep working with a route after he had left it: the vividness of a landscape is not proof that it was painted outdoors. The later Going Up Garrowby Hill (2000) returned to the subject in a tall, upright oil painting, changing the format within which the journey could unfold. ^{[19] [20] [3]}

The longer Yorkshire engagement of the following decade brought sustained work in front of the landscape. Guggenheim Bilbao’s 2012 survey placed paintings made from 2004 onwards at its centre, alongside drawings, sketchbooks, digital work and video. The presence of different media did not diminish oil painting’s role. They offered complementary ways of attending to a subject, from an individual study to a broad arrangement of canvases. The landscapes increasingly concerned what repeated observation could discover over time. ^[21]

A Closer Winter Tunnel, February–March (2006) makes that commitment concrete. The Art Gallery of New South Wales’s acquisition account describes Hockney working outdoors with canvases, easels and paints transported in a pick-up truck. The picture comprises six panels, making a substantial encounter with the landscape possible through units that could be handled separately. Its title also registers season and duration. A winter tunnel of trees offered an arrangement of branches and openings that a later stage of growth would alter. The work’s scale depended on a practical method of looking and making. ^[22]

Building a painting from many canvases

Multiple canvases helped Hockney address a central difficulty of landscape: the discrepancy between the breadth of a place and the limits of a portable rectangle. In A Bigger Grand Canyon (1998), sixty canvases form one painting. The National Gallery of Australia presented it alongside related drawings and photographic collages in its 1999–2000 exhibition Hockney & Stella, making the work’s connections with other kinds of image available for comparison. Within the painting itself, each unit participates in the panorama while the complete field asks for more than a single glance. ^[23]

The Foundation distinguishes two major canyon paintings from that year. A Bigger Grand Canyon drew on recollection and photographic work, while A Closer Grand Canyon followed a further visit during which Hockney made studies from observation. These are separate works and different processes. The comparison shows that memory, drawing and photography could enter painting in different proportions. A method that served one image did not have to become a rule for the next. The canvas grid provided a structure within which those differences could be developed. ^[19]

The Yorkshire Bigger Trees near Warter (2007) applied a related capacity for assembly to an outdoor painting on fifty canvases, approximately fifteen feet high and forty feet wide. Hockney described how seeing reproductions of earlier six-canvas paintings arranged together helped him imagine the much larger work. Digital photography enabled him to monitor the developing whole. The technology served the coordination of painted parts: the final object remained oil paint on canvases worked on in the landscape. ^{[24] [25]}

Its organisation involved more than enlarging a preliminary image. Hockney’s account describes prolonged looking at the branches and drawings intended to guide the distribution of the composition across its separate canvases. That distinction changes how we understand the work’s size. The painting required decisions about where a branch would continue, how one panel would meet another and how the entire structure would hold together. Its monumentality grew from a sequence of manageable acts, each constrained by the changing outdoor subject. ^[24]

At this scale, the viewer’s own position becomes more consequential. From a distance the canvases combine into a broad landscape; nearby, the same field exceeds easy inspection and must be explored in parts. The grid makes that relationship available to the eye. A seam may interrupt the illusion of continuous ground or sky, yet it also exposes how continuity has been made. The picture can offer an expansive place and a legible assembly of painted surfaces at once.

Painting the interval between seasons

Yorkshire supplied different kinds of seasonal subject, each asking for a different organisation. Bilbao’s exhibition records The Big Hawthorn (2008) across nine canvases, Winter Timber (2009) across fifteen, and Under the Trees, Bigger (2010–11) across twenty. The differing units matter: multi-canvas painting was a flexible construction method, not a fixed monumental format. The subject could be a flowering tree, worked timber or the experience of being beneath a canopy, with the breadth and arrangement adjusted accordingly. ^[21]

Seasons also changed what could be seen within a place. Branches exposed in winter could become concealed by leaves; an open interval could thicken into a screen; blossom could briefly dominate an otherwise familiar tree. Such changes gave repeated painting a specific purpose. Returning to the same landscape was a way of encountering different structures, colours and degrees of visibility. The pictures register the instability of a subject that might superficially seem permanent.

The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty eleven) brought these questions into a particularly expansive installation. The painting itself is oil on thirty-two canvases. Alongside it, the 2012 Royal Academy presentation included fifty-one selected iPad drawings from more than a hundred Hockney had made. The painted work and the digital sequence had different roles and should not be collapsed into a single medium or object count. They allowed an extended seasonal account and a large painted statement to be encountered together. ^[26]

Hockney’s description of the painting concentrated on the moment when early leaves begin to appear low on the trees and seem to float before full growth obscures the branches. This is a precise choice within the season. Spring did not simply provide a general emblem of renewal; it offered a temporary relationship between leaves, branches and open space. Painting could hold that interval at a scale larger than an individual study, while the accompanying drawings tracked successive changes. The two forms made time visible in different ways. ^[26]

Normandy and the late London paintings

Normandy continued the seasonal enquiry while giving acrylic painting fresh company. The Fondation Louis Vuitton’s account of its 2025 survey distinguishes the entirely digital 220 for 2020 from a separate group of acrylic landscapes, noting the animated touches with which Hockney treated their skies. It also identifies La Grande Cour (2019) as a panorama of twenty-four ink drawings. These distinctions preserve the particular work each medium was doing. A broad landscape could be drawn in ink, painted on a screen or developed in acrylic without becoming the same kind of object. ^[25]

The Normandy paintings also extended an art-historical conversation that had accompanied Hockney since the beginning. The 2025 survey placed recent works beside his engagement with painters including Claude, Cézanne, Van Gogh and Picasso. Its final London section included After Munch: Less is Known than People Think (2023) and After Blake: Less is Known than People Think (2024). The titles declare that looking at another artist could still lead to a new painting, across a very different interval from the early encounter with Picasso. ^[25]

The Foundation’s account of the 2024 Rouen exhibition likewise stresses the continued presence of painting on canvas alongside digital work. Its record identifies Giverny by DH (2023) as acrylic on canvas. Painting was still available for the landscape, just as it remained available for portraiture and the domestic interior. The later history is therefore a story of media accumulating and interacting. A device acquired for one task did not require the abandonment of tools already capable of producing another experience. ^[27]

In London during 2025, Hockney pursued reverse perspective in a new group of paintings. The Foundation’s chronology connects the pictures made in his studio that year with Some Very, Very, Very New Paintings Not Yet Shown in Paris at Annely Juda Fine Art. The gallery’s publication record identifies both Gauguin’s Chair and Vincent’s Chair, July 2025 and The Moon, August 25th, 2023 as acrylics on canvas. Chairs, the sky and inherited artistic subjects continued to provide concrete occasions for experiments with a painted rectangle. ^{[28] [29]}

The paintings presented at Serpentine in 2026 introduced another controlled comparison. Five portraits of people in Hockney’s close circle accompanied five still lifes, united by frontal compositions and the recurring setting of a gingham tablecloth. Abstraction Resting on a Red and White Checkered Tablecloth (2025) makes the relationship between abstract and figurative representation explicit in its title. An abstract arrangement can itself become something represented within a still life. The tablecloth gives different subjects a common pictorial stage. ^[30]

Serpentine paired these paintings with the separate digital frieze A Year in Normandie (2020–21). The juxtaposition made the continuity of Hockney’s interests clear without erasing differences of material, scale or construction. Painted faces and objects occupied discrete canvases; the seasonal work unfolded as an extended digitally made panorama. Both asked the viewer to attend to a representation, yet they organised that attention differently. His final years of work retained the freedom to place such distinct propositions beside one another. ^[30]

Following the paintings across the wider work

The most revealing comparisons cross the familiar divisions of Hockney’s career. The coded pair in Adhesiveness, the life-size double portraits and the repeated chair of the later portrait series all ask how people can be brought into a picture. The pools, California roads and Yorkshire woods ask how a surface can suggest something that changes as it is seen. Handwriting, a reflection line, a panel seam and a repeated tablecloth make the means of depiction available for inspection.

Hockney’s paintings reward attention to those means as well as to their subjects. Oil and acrylic, a narrow upright canvas and a panoramic assembly, direct observation and a remembered journey each offer different possibilities. His practice kept those possibilities open. Following a particular painting into its materials, format and process reveals a body of work whose recognisable places and people sustained a remarkably varied investigation of what painting could make visible.