David Hockney | Flowers, Still Life in the 21st Century: Gallery Exhibition: 7 Piccadilly Arcade

David Hockney’s most recent flower series represents a landmark in both his career and the broader trajectory of contemporary still life. Composed on the iPad, these works have already taken centre stage in his major ongoing retrospective David Hockney 25 at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, purportedly the largest retrospective exhibition in human history for any artist. It affirms Hockney’s enduring creative vitality, the global reach of his oeuvre and his position as the metaphysical interpreter of nature in the digital age.

 

Created at his Normandy farmhouse during the Covid lockdowns of 2021, the 20 Flowers series demonstrates a rare immediacy of vision. Working on his kitchen table, Hockney returned to the intimacy of close observation, capturing daffodils, tulips, and garden blooms arranged in various glass bottles and ceramic jugs. However, these still lifes are anything but static; they are imbued with movement, light, and spatial clarity, offering what he has called ‘a closer look’ at what is right in front of us. Like Monet in Giverny, Hockney revisits nature as both subject and source, translating the ordinary into the translucent extraordinary through the prism of colour, perspective and time.

 

These works, much like his Arrival of Spring series before, mark a significant evolution in Hockney’s practice. Though always an innovator, from fax drawings to works constructed through the photocopier (his famous home-made prints) it is in these pieces that he fully realises the painterly possibilities of new media. Far from sketches or studies, they belong to a new category of resolved, high-colour compositions that Hockney himself has referred to as iPad paintings rather than drawings.

 

The 20 Flowers series evokes joy, wonder, and light, and it is within these works that Hockney finds a renewed clarity and depth in the tradition of still life. The reflections on glass, the subtle gradations of colour in petal and stem, the patterning of tablecloths beneath vases, all reveal a painter at the peak of his visual perception. These are not just musings on nature, but on the act of looking itself and the notion that the objects themselves are calling us to celebrate them in their revelation of sight and visuality.