Ubiquitous | David Hockney at the NPG

David Hockney Painting Harry Styles, (With Portrait of Clive Davis), Normandy Studio, 1st June 2022. Photo: Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima. Courtesy of National Portrait Gallery

The National Portrait Gallery’s 2020 exhibition of portraits painted (and otherwise created) by David Hockney closed after just 22 days, due to governmental Covid restrictions. Hockney has since continued to invite sitters to his Normandy studio – including pop singer Harry Styles, pictured above – and 33 of these will be included in a new version of the exhibition, Drawing from Life, to be displayed at the National Portrait Gallery in November. Tickets have gone on sale this week.

The above photo, of a flat-capped, fag-in-mouth Hockney, painting the grinning Styles, is revealing of the artist’s recent methodology. He has moved back to using acrylic, after a period depicting the Normandy landscape on his iPad, painting directly onto the canvas with no under drawing. The portraits were completed in two to three sittings. On the wall hangs another in the series, of the American record producer Clive Davis, painted in May 2022. It was Davis, it seems, who suggested that Hockney should invite Styles to his studio. The 29-year-old singer was in Hockney’s wicker sitter’s chair within three weeks: he’s a fanboy of the 86-year-old artist, it turns out. Hockney, on the other hand, had never heard of the young singer, but has now ‘seen all his videos’. Maybe it’s mutual.

The NPG exhibition traces the trajectory of the artist’s portrait practice throughout his six-decade career, charting his bold experimentation with different media, including coloured pencil, pen, the 35mm camera and apps found on the iPhone and iPad. Certain sitters appear again and again, notably his friend Celia Birtwell; his mother Laura; his former partner, the curator Gregory Evans; his master printer Maurice Payne, and the artist himself. One can detect different influences in different periods of his career, from Ingres in the 70s, through Picasso in the 90s, to Rembrandt and van Gogh in the recent paintings.

The Yorkshire-born artist is ubiquitous this summer and autumn. His much-feted immersive show at the Lightroom in Kings Cross, Bigger and Smaller (not closer and further away) runs until December 3, and you can currently see his works in Tate Britain’s rehang, in the Capturing the Moment exhibition at Tate Modern, in the Study Rooms at the V&A, and at the Wallace Collection. There’s also a show of rarely seen early Hockney drawings, Love Life, opening in September at Charleston, in East Sussex.