“Collaboration means compromise.”

The disembodied voice is that of David Hockney, arguably this country’s greatest living artist, and the words are very much his own. Warm in tone, and movingly direct, they narrate the images that summarise his approach to designing for the theatre, but equally they could be describing Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away), an immersive exhibition, returning to Factory International in Manchester following an initial airing in 2024, which plumbs beneath six themed surfaces of some 60 years of artistic practice.

It’s hardly a stretch of the imagination to draw the comparison with David Attenborough, another national treasure, although in Bigger & Closer it’s Hockney’s own life that his warm and candid Yorkshire tones are narrating. Like Attenborough, there’s a generosity in his spirit, and a gift for kindling the sparks of his own fascination in others.

Indeed, for all the sensory razzle-dazzle of the now-familiar immersive experience, surrounding the viewer in a cube of cascading colour and light, ultimately the exhibition is imbued with the ethos of public service broadcasting; affording them access to Hockney’s vision, unclouded by the often off-putting polysyllables that the art world can sometimes use as a shroud of self-mystification. If Hockney is a wizard, he’s one with no qualms about pulling back the curtain to reveal his essential mortality. “I enjoy looking,” he explains, with admirable simplicity.

Of course, Hockney, a career-long neophile, always dipping his toes into the water of new technologies, whether they be Polaroid cameras or iPads, is an ideal fit for the bigger splash into three dimensions. Looking back, there’s a sense in which he has continually sought to wrest his art free from the flatness of the picture plane, and the straitjacket of the fixed point in time. His Polaroids in particular tumble onwards and outwards, in flagrant disregard of traditional geometries, pushing into the space of the present moment.

Building on those photographic developments, in his adoption of Lightroom‘s immersive technologies, soundtracked as it is by Nico Muhly’s quietly rapturous score, his theory and his practice come together in a perfect kiss. Its animations are the ideal fit for the storybook quality of his illustrative work for the theatre, revealing their super-naturalistic colours and forms as a Fantasia for the early years of the present century.

Other roads taken on the map of his practice are traced with equally illuminating results, some pursued more capriciously than others. “Fun drew me to Los Angeles,” Hockney confides. “I thought it was three times better than I had imagined,” he beams. It was a world of water, or – at any rate – of swimming pools, and that restless surface, too, beguiled him. “You make the lines dance,” he rhapsodises. “I’ve done it differently every time.”

A collaboration whose compromises do not show at the join, the exhibition brings Hockney’s boundless curiosity front and centre, always conveyed with the winning simplicity of an artist who can sum himself up with a modesty that rings joyfully true. “That’s my job, I think, making pictures.”

Alive to possibility, even when surveying his long vocation, Hockney has both eyes firmly on the next horizon. After all, as he emphasises, “You’re always seeing more. Well, that’s exciting to me.” Through the lens of Bigger & Closer, the audience, afforded a first-hand account of his creative decision-making, can look at the world through his eyes. Perhaps more importantly, they are encouraged to look again, through their own.

By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent

Main image: David Hockney – Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away) – Lightroom – credit Justin Sutcliffe

 

Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away) is at Aviva Studios, Manchester until January 11, 2026. For more information, click here.