David Hockney's Viewers Looking at Ready-made with Skull and Mirrors, 2018 available at Andipa
David Hockney’s remarkable career has been defined by an enduring curiosity about how we see the world. From intimate portraits and sunlit Californian swimming pools to photographic collages and digitally created landscapes, the British artist continually challenged conventional ideas of representation.
Two major presentations in Australia this autumn, David Hockney: Portraits in Print at the National Gallery of Australia and David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away) at Sydney’s Carriageworks, offer complementary perspectives on his artistic practice. Together, they illuminate an artist whose fascination with perception, technology and human relationships has continually expanded the possibilities of modern art.
David Hockney: A Lifelong Fascination with Portraiture
Portraiture has occupied a central position in David Hockney’s art for more than six decades. For Hockney, however, a portrait is more than a record of physical appearance. It is an exploration of personality, relationships and the subtle exchanges between artist and sitter. Born in Bradford in 1937, Hockney rose to prominence during the 1960s, becoming one of the most influential figures in British Pop Art. Although his early reputation was closely associated with the vibrant colours and contemporary imagery of his paintings, his approach to portraiture reveals a more intimate dimension of his work.
Throughout his career, Hockney returned to the people closest to him, including friends, family members, fellow artists and collaborators. His portraits capture not only individual likenesses but also the social worlds in which these relationships developed. This enduring interest in the human face is explored in David Hockney: Portraits in Print, which opened at the National Gallery of Australia in September 2026. Spanning nearly three decades, the presentation brings together prints that document Hockney’s personal relationships and his engagement with the cultural environments of London, Paris and Los Angeles during the 1970s and 1980s.
The works demonstrate how Hockney adapted his visual language to the possibilities of printmaking, using line, colour and composition to create portraits that are both formally inventive and psychologically engaging.
David Hockney’s Printmaking: Experimentation and Expression
Although Hockney is widely celebrated for his paintings, printmaking has been fundamental to his artistic development. He approached etching, lithography and other printmaking techniques not simply as ways of reproducing existing images, but as independent creative processes. His prints reveal a particular sensitivity to the relationship between line and expression. In works depicting friends and acquaintances, subtle changes in contour can convey character with remarkable economy. Elsewhere, bold colours and simplified forms demonstrate his willingness to depart from traditional approaches to portraiture.
Hockney’s engagement with printmaking also reflects his broader interest in the history of image-making. Throughout his career, he investigated how different techniques influence what an artist can communicate, exploring the distinctive qualities of each medium rather than adhering to a single established method. For collectors interested in David Hockney prints, this versatility is particularly significant. His graphic works offer a different perspective on his artistic practice, revealing how he translated his characteristic curiosity into editions that are both technically accomplished and visually distinctive. Portraits in Print provides an opportunity to consider these works in their own right, highlighting the importance of printmaking within Hockney’s wider contribution to contemporary art.
David Hockney: Bigger & Closer — Rethinking Perspective
While Portraits in Print offers an intimate examination of individual works, David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away) presents his art on an entirely different scale. Opening at Carriageworks in Sydney on 22 October 2026, the immersive presentation uses large-scale projections, animation and sound to explore approximately sixty years of Hockney’s artistic practice. Narrated by Hockney himself and accompanied by a specially composed score by Nico Muhly, the experience transforms his paintings, drawings and other works into a dynamic visual environment.
The presentation reflects one of the defining questions of Hockney’s career: how can an artist represent the experience of seeing?
Traditional perspective often assumes a fixed viewpoint, positioning the viewer at a particular distance from a stable scene. Hockney, by contrast, repeatedly experimented with alternative ways of representing space, movement and perception. His photographic joiners, for example, combine multiple photographs into compositions that challenge the limitations of a single camera angle. His later digital drawings and panoramic landscapes similarly explore how images can convey the experience of looking around, moving through a place or observing the passage of time. By presenting these works through immersive projections, Bigger & Closer makes Hockney’s investigations of perspective accessible in a new way. Viewers encounter his art not only as individual images but as part of a continuously unfolding visual experience.
From Traditional Techniques to Digital Art
Hockney’s willingness to embrace new technology has been one of the most distinctive aspects of his career. Alongside painting and printmaking, he explored photography, photocopiers, fax machines, computers and, more recently, drawing on the iPad. These experiments were never simply demonstrations of technological novelty. Instead, Hockney approached each medium as an opportunity to reconsider the relationship between observation and representation. His iPad drawings, in particular, reveal how digital tools can support the immediacy of traditional drawing while introducing new possibilities for colour, layering and composition. His monumental digital landscape A Year in Normandie (2020–21) extends this exploration, transforming observations of the changing seasons into an expansive panoramic work.
Across these different media, Hockney maintained a consistent commitment to the act of looking. Whether working with a pencil, a printing plate or a digital screen, he continued to ask how images might communicate the richness and complexity of visual experience.
The Enduring Appeal of David Hockney’s Art
The two Australian presentations demonstrate the breadth of Hockney’s achievement. Portraits in Print reveals the intimacy and technical precision of his graphic work, while Bigger & Closer highlights his expansive investigations of perspective, technology and the possibilities of visual storytelling. Together, they offer a compelling reminder that Hockney’s significance extends beyond his most recognisable images. His contribution lies equally in his restless experimentation and his ability to make familiar subjects appear newly observed.
For collectors and admirers of modern and contemporary art, his work continues to reward close attention. His portraits offer insights into human relationships; his prints reveal the expressive possibilities of line and colour; and his digital experiments demonstrate that artistic innovation need not come at the expense of traditional skills. Ultimately, David Hockney’s art returns to a deceptively simple proposition: seeing is an active, imaginative process. Across six decades of experimentation, he has continually encouraged audiences to reconsider how they look at people, places and the world around them.