New David Hockney Exhibition Opens At Salts Mill

A new David Hockney exhibition will open at Salts Mill in Saltaire on 29^th January 2025.

20 Flowers for 2025 and Some Bigger Pictures is the first time that Mr Hockney’s series of 20 iPad flower paintings and accompanying large-scale landscape and abstract works – “new looking fresh pictures of a very beautiful world”, as the artist says - have been exhibited in the UK outside of London.

Of creating the 20 Flowers Mr Hockney has said:

“I started these flowers in February 2021. I was just sitting at the table in our house and I caught sight of some flowers in a vase on the table. Being February the sun was low casting a deep shadow on the table.  I decided to draw it, the background was dark so I made a rich brown for it. After printing it I put it on the far wall facing the table. There it stayed for a few days. It looked very beautiful to me.

A few days later I started another from the same position with the same ceramic vase, this took longer to do. Then I realised if I put the flowers in a glass vase the sun would catch the water and painting glass would be a more interesting thing to do. So then I was off.”

David Hockney

"25th June 2022, Looking at the Flowers (Framed)"

Photographic drawing

© David Hockney

assisted by Jonathan Wilkinson

Also on view for the first time in Europe will be a 6-screen video installation with recordings of Mr Hockney’s brushstrokes on his iPad, showing the creation of ‘10th – 22nd June 2021, Water Lilies in the Pond with Pots of Flowers.’ Mr Hockney calls his iPad work “hand done in a new way.” 

David Hockney has created one superb 3 metre by 5 metre work in this exhibition in which he appears not once but twice.  In ‘25th June 2022, Looking at the Flowers (Framed)’ two Mr Hockneys sit surveying the 20 Flowers, both with backs to the camera, white-capped and blue-suited, one smoking, the other not. Of this image, Mr Hockney says:

“This is photographic but is in no way an ordinary photograph. I had been doing what I called photographic drawings giving a much more 3D effect. Ironically the only things not photographed in this picture are the flowers themselves.

The objects on the floor are all photographed in 3D, one walks round the object and then the computer makes an image that can be turned any way you want, this is why I called them photographic drawings. You can place them anywhere in the picture, so I think it’s a new kind of photography that avoids perspective. I am continuing with this research.”

The work by this Bradford-born, world-renowned artist will delight visitors to Salts Mill and those who’ve come from far and wide to experience 2025, Bradford’s year as City of Culture.

20 Flowers for 2025 and Some Bigger Pictures is open from January 29^th, Wednesday to Sunday, 10am-4pm, admission free. Salts Mill is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays.