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David Hockney: A Retrospective
Centre Pompidou, Paris. 21 June to 23 October 2017
The David Hockney retrospective in 2017 was a global event, but seeing it at the Pompidou—with its industrial “inside-out” architecture contrasting against Hockney’s saturated, sun-drenched canvases—was a singular experience. It was a celebration of his 80th birthday and an example of how an artist can stay relentlessly modern.
The Pools and the Portraits
The show is massive… over 160 works… and seeing the “canonical” Hockney pieces in person is a reminder of why they became icons in the first place. A Bigger Splash (1967) is much more technical than you’d think; the way he painted the water spray with tiny, deliberate brushes makes the “instant” moment feel like it took a lifetime to capture.
But it’s the double portraits that stopped me. Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy is haunting in person. There is a specific kind of stillness in those 1970s paintings, a domestic tension that is both incredibly chic and also unnerving.
The Technophile
The most surprising part of the show is the final rooms. Most artists “slow down” or get traditional as they hit their 70s and 80s. Hockney did the opposite. Seeing a wall of iPad drawings, luminous, neon-bright landscapes of Yorkshire, proves he is more obsessed with the now than artists half his age.
He’s spent sixty years asking the same question: How do we actually see the world? Whether he’s using a Polaroid camera, a fax machine, or a tablet, the answer is always the same: with total, unadulterated joy.
2026 Retrospective Note:
Reading this back, I realize that 2017 was a pivot point. We thought that was the “final” retrospective, but Hockney just kept going. He spent the pandemic in Normandy painting the arrival of spring on his iPad, and those works have since become their own chapter in art history.
Raymond Pettibon: Th Explosiyv Shoyrt T
David Zwirner: New York. April 29—June 24, 2017
Georg Baselitz: “The Painter in his Bed”
Gagosian, New York, November 9–December 22, 2023
Georg Baselitz (born Hans-Georg Kern, 1938) is a German painter and sculptor, commonly known for painting his subjects upside down. He took this approach as a pivot in his career in 1969, with a show of inverted portraits that soon became his signature gesture.
This exhibit is series of neo-expressionist paintings, paired subjects of figures in a bed and inverted deer stags.
The compelling works featured in The Painter in His Bed focus on two motifs: figures in bed and the stag. Defining human and animal anatomy with raw expression, Baselitz negotiates apperception of these subjects through his distinctive painterly approach. Vigorously applying layers of paint, he affixes stretched nylon stockings and sheets of gauze across the upper parts of the paintings or makes monoprinted impressions of their shapes. With these additions, Baselitz extends the innovation of Springtime, his 2021 exhibition in the same space in New York. Dedicated to the spirited provocations of Hannah Höch, Kurt Schwitters, and other Dadaists, the works in Springtime draw upon these artists’ irreverent introduction of everyday materials into the realm of art. Whereas many of the Springtime paintings are exuberantly colored, the new works are dominated by elemental contrasts of black and white.
Gagosian Gallery
Kara Walker: Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine)
SF MoMA, San Francisco, July 1 2024 – June 7 2026
Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine)
A Respite for the Weary Time-Traveler.
Featuring a Rite of Ancient Intelligence Carried out by The Gardeners
Toward the Continued Improvement of the Human Specious
by
Kara E-Walker
Kara Walker’s Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine) is an intricate, imposing sculptural installation that confronts the viewer with the brutal machinery of empire, myth, and memory. In her signature fusion of historical allegory and visual spectacle, Walker constructs a haunting tableau.
The work centers on Fortuna, the Roman goddess of luck and fate, reimagined through the lens of colonial violence. Mechanical elements suggest both the churn of progress and the dehumanizing gears of oppression — evoking the plantation, the empire, the factory, and the museum all at once. Figures emerge in silhouette or sculptural form, echoing Walker’s earlier cut-paper work but rendered here in three-dimensional space. It is monumental and inescapable.
Fortuna and the Immortality Garden is not a place of peace, but of decay masked as beauty. The “garden” is littered with the wreckage of history, and the “machine” is a self-perpetuating myth engine. It grinds trauma into iconography.
As with much of Walker’s work, the piece invites viewers into complicity: to witness, to feel, and to reckon with the myths they’ve inherited.