Picking up where David Hockney’s 2011 Royal Academy exhibition left off, this show reinforces everything that’s great about Bradford’s finest chain-smoking septuagenarian (his ability to transform a nondescript stretch of country lane into an endlessly fluctuating world) and everything that isn’t (his apparently unqualified love of technology). In Annely Juda’s top-floor space, still one of the most beautiful in town, are his iPad drawings from 2011. At the RA, these were shown on screens, illuminated. Here, they’ve been printed off and blown up large. They’re horribly flat, a quality glaringly at odds with the burgeoning hedgerows they describe.
Downstairs you’ll see drawings made last year in good old charcoal on paper. Not only do they show a broader seasonal range, they also put the computer-generated images to shame with their variety of mark-making. Hockney, of course, has earned the right to do whatever the hell he likes. He’s one of the true greats of British art. And his embrace of new technologies – from Polaroids to colour printers to tablets – is part of what makes him so important (and atypical among Brit artists). So it must be technology’s fault. If you’re reading this on a Californian tech campus, put down your sashimi and invent something that makes our David look the business. Please.
Martin Coomer