Portland Art Museum’s new exhibition shows the artist’s evolving style across 60 years and 200 artworks. by Lindsay Costello “David sees the world backward,” says Doug Roberts, a Los Angeles art dealer and longtime friend of David Hockney. Roberts was appearing on a panel about the artist, as part of Portland Art Museum’s (PAM) new exhibition tracing 60 years of Hockney’s work. He meant it as praise. Hockney, whose sunny California scenes somehow simmer with loneliness, has built a career on challenging how we see. He embraces new artistic technologies, elevates everyday objects, and believes that perspective isn’t fixed in a work of art—actually, it begins with you, the viewer. Walk into David Hockney: Works from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation and you’ll notice that challenge. The space behaves like a Hockney composition, playful and a little disorienting. Brilliant blue walls break up the exhibition rooms, installed at unexpected angles and punctured with cut-out apertures, like camera viewfinders. "Gregory in the Pool (Paper Pool 4)" (1978). Colored and pressed paper pulp. © David Hockney / Tyler Graphics Ltd. David Hockney occupies two museum levels; it’s an expanded version of a touring show organized by the Honolulu Museum of Art, and compiles 200 Hockney pieces pulled from Schnitzer’s expansive holdings. The show spans six decades of Hockney’s career, showing special attention to his print works and technological experiments. You’ll see all of the subjects that feel quintessentially Hockney, but this exhibition demonstrates that his greatest throughline isn’t pools, or portraits, or even California light. It’s his ability to adapt. The 88-year-old artist—and yes, he’s still working—approaches every new tool with fresh curiosity. Xeroxed prints, Polaroid snapshots, and iPad drawings share the stage with lithographs and etchings.  The exhibition begins upstairs where a visual timeline traces Hockney’s youth in a Yorkshire mill town, his graduation from the Royal College of Art, and his move to Los Angeles in the ’60s, up through last year’s major retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. Early etchings and aquatints line the walls alongside his theater designs and eerie, Grimm fairy tale-inspired illustrations. A standout from this period is Hockney’s "Illustrations for Fourteen Poems from C.P Cavafy” (1966-67), inspired by the work of the lesser-known Greek poet, whose verses speak frankly of queer love. Hockney released the series—which depicts tender, full-frontal male nudity—in the wake of Britain’s ’67 decriminalization of homosexuality. The etchings forecasted a recurring theme for Hockney: loneliness tangled with intimacy and desire. On the show’s lower level we explore Hockney’s dualities—presence and solitude, tradition and machine. We sense the grief of his losses; in the ’80s and ’90s, the artist lost several friends to AIDS and other friends to cancer. His everyday subjects—empty chairs, an ashtray, a Panama hat—carry a softened mourning. Installed alongside his 1998 dachshund etchings, which fill an entire wall, the viewer sees an artist seeking domestic tenderness. "Montcalm Interior" (2010). iPad drawing printed on paper. © David Hockney. Elsewhere, the exhibition remains defined by his experimentation. David Hockney includes many of the artist’s more recent iPad drawings, including those created in Yosemite in 2010. The compositions explode with scribbled skies, violet cliffs, and yellow halos of foliage. Hockney’s electric green landscapes look freshly rained upon. In the PAM sculpture court, several iPads are installed for viewers to create their own compositions. It could come off as product placement, but it’s quite earnest. The iPad’s glowing screen has allowed Hockney to draw at any hour; his prints are constrained only by the width of a large format printer. "10th - 22nd June 2021, Water Lilies in the Pond with Pots of Flowers" (2021). Six iPad paintings comprising a single work, printed on two sheets of paper, mounted on two sheets of Dibond. © David Hockney. Some of the exhibit feels a little mischievous, like a refusal of contemporary minimalism. On the lower level, a collection of lo-fi photocopied prints hang in ornate frames. Similarly, Hockney’s nine-screen video installation “Woldgate Woods, Winter” (2010) stitches together a moving collage of a Yorkshire landscape, made from cameras mounted to Hockney’s Jeep. Seams are visible, and each frame is slightly off-kilter.  “My Mother, Los Angeles, Dec. ’82” (1982) represents one of Hockney’s most enduring experiments. During this period, he began assembling what he calls “photo joiners,” arranging dozens of snapshots in an active composition that replicates how the eye might experience a portrait sitter. The practice evolved into what Hockney calls “photographic drawings,” complex digital compositions built of hundreds or thousands of images—several of which are also on view in this show, including “Perspective Should Be Reversed” (2014). The idea of reversed perspective remains Hockney’s central thesis. Put simply, you are the vanishing point. Rather than gazing toward a distant horizon, Hockney’s goal is that your eye moves through the image, the way it moves through space. To this end, he has embraced technology as a tool, but it’s hard to travel through an exhibit of Hockney’s continued adaptations and not wonder what the artist thinks of AI-generated work. Will he embrace it as well? L.A. Louver gallery director Kimberly Davis, speaking on the panel, feels he’d be against it. “I can’t imagine David would be happy with AI,” she said. “His eye, hand, and heart are still in his art.” It’s true. Hockney’s sense of composition and color feels totally singular, impossible to replicate. “Technology has always contributed to art,” he has notably said. “The brush is a piece of technology, isn't it? But tools don't make pictures. People have to make them."Art endures because humans endure, and for Hockney, technology represents a guiding ethos of open-mindedness held in tandem with precision. If he sees the world backward, maybe it’s just that he’s looking more carefully. In this exhibition, the viewer is asked to do the same. David Hockney: Works from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation is on display at the Portland Art Museum, 1219 SW Park, through Sun July 26, included with general admission, hours and more info at portlandartmuseum.org. ...read more read less