There’s a kind of quiet mischief in the title alone — Some Very, Very, Very New Paintings Not Yet Shown in Paris. It’s pure Hockney: self-aware, playful, and ever so slightly cheeky. On Tuesday, the 87-year-old artist turned up at Annely Juda Fine Art’s new Hanover Square space with his grand-nephew Richard, watching the final touches go up for what will be his fourteenth show with the gallery. He looked pleased, apparently, which is no small thing for a man who’s spent more than six decades pushing against the limits of what a picture can be.
This new exhibition, opening on 7 November, gathers paintings created over the past six months in his London studio. The works are, by all accounts, domestic and immediate: portraits of friends and family, still lifes, and a new self-portrait featuring the ever-present Richard. There are flowers too, because Hockney has always painted flowers — though these are said to glow with a sort of artificial warmth, a late style emerging from digital habits and long evenings in Normandy.
Then there’s The Moon Room, a suite of fifteen iPad paintings of the night sky. These began in 2020, during his lockdown exile in rural France, where he spent his evenings watching the moon drag its light across the orchard outside his house. It’s the kind of subject only Hockney would tackle with such earnestness — the moon, trees, shadows on grass — rendered not in paint but on a glowing tablet. “Once, when we were just sitting outside the house,” he said, “we turned off all the lights to see the moonlight more clearly. The moon could then be seen to cast shadows of the trees on the grass, so with my backlit iPad, I could draw it.”
That anecdote says everything about Hockney’s late career. Where other painters might fret over the purity of oil on canvas, he finds the next tool and gets on with it. From Polaroids to fax machines to Photoshop to the iPad, he’s never been nostalgic about the medium — only about seeing itself. The iPad, for him, isn’t a gimmick; it’s a modern sketchbook that allows him to work as fast as light moves. In The Moon Room, that luminosity becomes the point: painting by illumination, painting light rather than its reflection.
This is a quieter show than his blockbuster at the Fondation Louis Vuitton earlier this year, which drew nearly a million visitors. But it feels more personal, even intimate — an old friend working at home, still restless. At almost ninety, Hockney could easily coast on his reputation. Instead, he’s still experimenting, still making work that feels oddly fresh, sometimes a little naïve, always sincere. The brushwork (or its digital equivalent) remains unmistakably his: clean, direct, and rhythmically off-beat.
The timing of this exhibition is almost poetic. It opens as Annely Juda Fine Art moves into its new Hanover Square gallery — a grand Georgian space with a domed ceiling and more natural light than most museums can dream of. Founded by Annely Juda and her son, David, in 1968, the gallery has long been one of Hockney’s most loyal champions, showcasing his work through every phase of reinvention. Now run by David Juda and Nina Fellmann, it’s a gallery that, like its star artist, refuses to stand still.
Next spring, Hockney will unveil A Year in Normandie at the Serpentine — a ninety-metre frieze inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry. It will likely be grand, maybe a little mad. But before that, Some Very, Very, Very New Paintings offers a glimpse of something smaller, more human. It’s not about legacy. It’s about the ongoing pleasure of looking, of drawing, of making something new — again.
David Hockney: Some Very, Very, Very New Paintings Not Yet Shown in Paris
Annely Juda Fine Art, 16 Hanover Square, London W1S 1HT
7 November 2025 – early 2026 Tuesday–Friday, 10 am–5:30 pm; Saturday, 11 am–5 pm. Closed Sundays and Mondays.
Read More
Visit