Trying to keep up with the kids is never a good look. So David Hockney’s insistence on producing art on his iPad should be nothing short of ball-shrivellingly cringeworthy. But it’s not. Because Hockney isn’t trying to modernise or keep up: the iPad is a tool, it allows him freedom, it’s an extension of how he works. And the images collected here swim happily alongside lots of his best work, as his brilliant five-star Tate retrospective proves. Well done, granddad.
This show of digital drawings captures drooping mountain pines, imposing rocky outcroppings, purple lanes, ochre roads and shimmering green forests. If anything, the crisp inhuman perfection of digital colour just sharpens Hockney’s work. They’re all imbued with his aesthetic – they’re hazy but clear, soft but hard.
The four digital collages here on the other hand are cheesy and nauseatingly hideous. But ignore them, if you can, because the rest of the exhibition just shows why we should be so happy that Hockney is still with us, and still painting beautifully.
@eddyfrankel
