A new multimedia space in King's Cross gets an entrancing baptism with this immersive show from one of Britain's best-loved artists.
Based next to Coal Drops Yard on Lewis Cubbitt Square, Lightroom, is a three-storey-high sunken rectangular box hosting artist-led exhibitions and performances.
In conventional galleries you move through the space, but with Hockney's self-narrated meander through his 60-year career you stay put while the art moves around you.
Produced by Primrose Hill theatre director Nicholas Hytner, and recieved on tiered seating or lying on the floor, the 50-minute loop of giant animated projections is a cross between a personal documentary, and a show - with Nico Muhly's beautiful original music accompanying Hockney's vivid artworks.
Divided into six chapters (pools, paths, photography, performance etc) the most effective sections are filmic or theatrical; Hockney's designs for opera sets are accompanied by soaring snatches of Mozart, Puccini, Wagner and Ravel, as animated masked figures from Tristan and Isolde or dragonflies from L'enfant et les Sortileges dance across the walls.
A filmed car journey through the Californian hills to the strains of Wagner is a thrill ride; Hockney explains how the luminous light, swimming pools, street grids, and driving culture of his adopted L.A influenced his artworks.
His intriguing period making photographic cubist collages segues to the assertion that it's impossible to capture the Grand Canyon on camera - only paint can fully render its 360 degree majesty - as the screens reveal multiple sunset-soaked paintings of its rocky landscape.
By contrast, their are rolling English fields, Woldgate Woods surrounds you on four screens each in a different season, and one of his Normandy paintings is 'created' before our eyes; blocks of colour filled in to reveal the whole picture, as Hockney explains how he still loves painting and finds endless fascination in looking.
We peep into his sketchbooks, get a bossy lecture on perspective, and a tour of his iPad paintings. After telling us how 60s L.A was a liberating antidote to post-war Britain, the section on swimming pools is unrevealing. He talks of his fascination with painting water, but never mentions the youthful, taut-buttocked male figures moving through it.
Some prefer canvases to projections, and there were moments I wanted to pause on a work as you do in a gallery. But having tired of dragging footweary children to overcrowded 'don't-touch' galleries there's room for an entertaining glimpse into the visual world of an accessible artist, who continues to innovate at 85.
David Hockney Bigger&Closer (Not smaller & further away) runs at Lightroom in King's Cross until June 4. https://lightroom.uk/about/
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