David Hockney: Some Very, Very, Very New Paintings Not Yet Shown in Paris at Annely Juda Fine Art
It’s been quite a year for one of the world’s greatest living painters, the 88-year-old son of Bradford, David Hockney. 2025 has already seen him following the esteemed footsteps of Francis Bacon and Henry Moore as a British artist honoured with a comprehensive career retrospective exhibition in Paris. David Hockney 25 at the Louis Vuitton Foundation was a huge blockbuster, sell-out of a show, pretty much universally acclaimed to the rooftops. Having discreetly returned to the country of his birth in 2023 after four artistically productive years in Normandy, Hockney has continued to be unwaveringly prolific. The Yorkshireman’s London dealer since the 1990s, Annely Juda Fine Art has now chosen his latest works for the inaugural exhibition at their smart new Hanover Square home. The very title, Some Very, Very, Very New Paintings Not Yet Shown in Paris, paints its own picture of Hockney’s playful sense of humour.
Even by the artist’s standards, an explosive feast of colour is on display. A parallel could potentially be drawn with late Matisse paper cut-outs in terms of sheer joy of pigment. Both men share the same tremendous creative vigour that belies their autumnal years. The majority of these works have been created over the last six months by Hockney in his London studio. Over the course of that period, he has been experimenting with “reverse perspective”, which in essence brings together multiple viewpoints into the two-dimensional plane of the canvas. A film at the entrance of Annely Juda addresses the concept through the artist’s analysis and reworkings of the likes of Fra Angelico’s The Annunciation (1440-1445) and Meindert Hobbema’s The Avenue at Middelharnis (1689).
The opening room here offers a strong sense of the domestic. There are still lifes featuring brightly coloured chequered tablecloths laden with vivid fruit opposite remarkably vibrant canvases of tables and chairs, mostly in interiors. Three of these furniture works are set on a floor seemingly consisting of triangular fans of reds and orange hues that truly zing, particularly the blue chairs. In two, he has stuck photographs, presumably of views of his garden, into the compositions at choice junctures of the rooms’ walls, alongside the painted, vertically lined wallpaper to emphasise the perspective. Arguably, the painting that sears itself into your visual memory more than any other, however, is the acrylic Gauguin’s Chair and Vincent’s Chair, July 2025. It is as if he is summoning the souls of these one-time friends to patch up their differences over a pipe and a bottle of Bordeaux. The chairs, one purple, one yellow, sizzle with energy, their splayed legs testifying to his deployment of reverse perspective.
Recent portraits of friends and family from earlier this year are found in the following larger room, known as “the Ballroom”. Depicted among others are the gallerist John Kasmin and his wife Jane, and the artist’s frequently baseball-hatted great-nephew Richard Hockney. A quirky new painting set within an oval, Richard Watching Me Paint This Seated on a Chair with Big Wheels, September 2025, does exactly what it says on the tin. Hockney seems to find some humour in his predicament. Another work, The Conversation, July 2025, featuring three images of his great-nephew head down texting, a mirror reflecting him doing just that and another portrait of the younger man standing with hands in pockets, device firmly away. It strikes an original tone and one unquestionably set in the present.
Flowers continue to be a subject of fascination for Hockey. The recent painting, Delphiniums on My Garden Table, July 2025, has at its centre a spectacular bouquet the artist received on his 88th birthday in July. One also finds the modern master challenging traditional Western rules of perspective again in Three Vases on a Table, Inside, August 2025. The blue and white chequered table is opened out like an accordion, the vases of flowers apparently out of all proportion with the Lilliputian chairs in the foreground.
Upstairs, one encounters “The Moon Room”, an area devoted to a series of mostly iPad works Hockney made from the height of the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020 to September 2023. Based in the grounds of the idyllic Normandy residence where he lived at the time, the octogenarian is seen using his device to capture the luminous orb in the night sky as it glows above the darkly silhouetted trees, casting moody shadows. One, entitled 5th December 2020, depicts a lone Christmas tree in Hockney’s garden in France. It stands colourfully illuminated against the darkened night sky, topped with a suitably festive white star. On the right, closer to the viewer, appears the side of the artist’s then home decorated in baubles. Maybe a touch of defiance can be read into that singular Yuletide tree. Hockney’s curiosity and investigatory nature that feeds his constant search for composition are very much to the fore. These innovative, ever-experimental works are a life-affirming delight.
James White
Photo: Courtesy of Annely Juda Fine Art
David Hockney: Some Very, Very, Very New Paintings is at Annely Juda Fine Art from 7th November 2025 until 28th February 2026. For further information or to book, visit the exhibition’s website here.
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