David Hockney at Carriageworks: A Case for Looking Twice.
At Carriageworks, an expansive installation revisits six decades of David Hockney’s experiments with perspective, technology and the everyday, making a persuasive case for something increasingly difficult to do: Pay attention.
David Hockney has always had a weakness for looking at things from the wrong angle. Fortunately, he made a career of it.
A swimming pool, a country road, a row of trees or the view through a window might seem unpromising subjects for an artist who has spent a lifetime testing the limits of representation. Hockney, however, has never been especially interested in a subject’s supposed importance. He is more concerned with what happens when it is approached from an unexpected direction.
That instinct animates David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away), now showing at Sydney’s Carriageworks. Created by Hockney with London’s Lightroom, the installation brings his work into a four-sided environment of monumental projections, animation and sound. Hockney narrates the experience himself, accompanied by an original score by Nico Muhly. Across six chapters, painting, photography, digital drawing and theatrical design become part of an extended investigation into perception and the limits of a single viewpoint.
The format is spectacular by design. Images spread across the industrial walls, changing scale and perspective around the viewer. Yet the more interesting subject is the gap between seeing something and understanding what it reveals.
Hockney has spent decades exploring that gap.
His photographic Joiners, assembled from images taken at different angles and moments, challenge the camera’s claim to a single, authoritative viewpoint. A scene becomes a collection of partial observations rather than a tidy visual verdict. The result can appear fractured, but it also captures something conventional photography tends to conceal: Experience rarely arrives in one perfectly composed instant.
We turn our heads, move closer, notice one thing and then another. Memory fills in the gaps. Hockney makes this process visible, suggesting that a composite image can sometimes convey the experience of being somewhere more convincingly than a photograph that records a single moment.
It is an argument with a long history.
Western painting spent centuries perfecting linear perspective, establishing a convincing relationship between viewer and image. Hockney’s experiments suggest that this system, however ingenious, is only one way of arranging reality. The world does not obligingly remain still while we inspect it from a designated spot.
His curiosity extends well beyond photography. Hockney has moved between painting, printmaking, opera design and digital media without much interest in the familiar argument over whether new tools represent progress or heresy. The iPad is simply another means of making an image. A brush has not become obsolete because a screen can do something different, any more than a camera has rendered the eye redundant.
This openness to the possibilities of a medium is central to the installation. Technology gives the work an unusual physical presence, but the work itself remains the point. Notebooks open in choreographed succession; landscapes acquire movement; theatrical designs introduce the heightened artifice of opera. The effect is of entering an imagination in which ideas are continually tested, discarded and reconsidered.
Hockney’s stage designs are particularly revealing.
His work for productions including The Rake’s Progress, The Magic Flute and Tristan und Isolde places painting inside a medium that cannot be separated from time. A stage image must coexist with music, performers and narrative; its meaning shifts as the performance unfolds. Painting becomes part of an experience rather than an object sealed off from the world.
There is, inevitably, a risk in presenting art through an immersive environment.
Scale can overwhelm nuance, while technological ingenuity has a habit of congratulating itself. The contemporary appetite for experiences that promise to put us inside a work of art sometimes confuses proximity with understanding. Standing inside an image is not necessarily the same as comprehending it.
The installation is most persuasive when its projections reveal something about Hockney’s process or the persistence of his curiosity. Without that underlying intelligence, even the grandest digital canvas would be little more than a very expensive screensaver. Hockney’s narration helps keep the machinery in perspective. His voice is conversational rather than professorial, guiding the viewer through decisions and enthusiasms without insisting on a definitive interpretation.
There is pleasure in hearing an artist explain not only what he made, but what prompted him to make it. Curiosity, in Hockney’s case, is less a grand philosophical position than a habit that has never quite worn out.
The writer Georges Perec pursued a related interest in the apparently insignificant. In An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, he recorded the passing details of a public square: buses, pedestrians, changes in light, the small events that usually disappear beneath the threshold of notice. His project was to recover what familiarity makes invisible.
Hockney arrives at similar territory through colour and image rather than lists and observation.
Neither needs to dress the ordinary up as extraordinary. A tree can remain a tree; a swimming pool, a swimming pool. The interest lies in a particular shade of blue, the shape of a shadow or the way sunlight alters a surface over an afternoon. Such details are easy to overlook precisely because they are always there.
Hockney’s landscapes and digital drawings make a case for returning to familiar subjects without embarrassment. In a culture that prizes novelty, repetition might seem an eccentric use of time. Yet familiarity need not exhaust a subject; a change in light, medium or perspective can disclose something previously missed.
There is a poignant dimension to this Sydney presentation, too. Hockney died in June 2026, aged 88, before the exhibition arrived in Australia. Conceived during his lifetime and developed in close collaboration with him, the installation carries the energy of an artist still exploring what an image might do. His career resists the neatness of a finished argument.
Even when returning to familiar subjects, he continued to change the terms of the encounter.
Carriageworks provides a fitting setting for this restless approach. The scale of Bay 17 allows the images to escape the confines of the frame, while the building’s industrial character offers a counterpoint to Hockney’s vivid colours and shifting landscapes. For a time, the architecture itself becomes part of the work.
Then the exhibition ends, and Sydney resumes its usual business. There are streets to cross, trains to catch and trees to pass without a second thought. The afternoon light remains the afternoon light. What may change is the willingness to recognise its particular character.
That is the lasting value of Bigger & Closer.
The technology brings us into Hockney’s visual world, but it cannot supply the curiosity that made that world possible. That remains our own responsibility, and a rather pleasurable one.
Hockney spent a lifetime finding new ways to represent what he saw; his more enduring gift may be the reminder that the familiar is rarely as exhausted as we assume.
*David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away) is showing at Bay 17, Carriageworks, 245 Wilson Street, Eveleigh, Sydney, from 22 October 2026 to 24 January 2027; details and tickets are available via the Carriageworks website.
---
Words by AW.
Photo courtesy of Carriageworks.
