David Hockney London Exhibition Review

This is an opinion piece. Views expressed are the author's own and do not constitute professional advice.

The David Hockney London exhibition at Annely Juda Fine Art lands with a burst of colour, a new gallery space and a reminder that Hockney still paints with more curiosity than most artists half his age. Opening in early November 2025 at the gallery’s new Hanover Square home, the show brings together brand new acrylic paintings and the first full UK presentation of The Moon Room. It’s confident, witty and exactly the kind of exhibition that gets London buzzing.

This is the fourteenth time Hockney has shown with Annely Juda, and he’s chosen to mark the gallery’s big move with a body of work painted in his London studio over the last six months. These are genuinely fresh canvases, still carrying the energy and speed of their making. One standout is Vincent’s Chair and Gauguin’s Chair (2025), a 91.4 x 121.9 cm acrylic that folds multiple viewpoints into a single domestic interior.

Reverse perspective gets even bolder

Hockney has spent decades arguing that traditional linear perspective doesn’t capture how humans actually see. We don’t stare through a fixed point. We move, we shift, and our peripheral vision does half the work. In these new canvases, he composes entire rooms using several vanishing points at once. The effect is slightly disorienting in the best way. You see more than you’re supposed to see, which is exactly his point.

The interiors are full of colour, angular furniture, warm light and visual puzzles. Rather than trickery, it feels like generosity. Hockney is offering you more information than a single viewpoint could hold.

The Moon Room is the quiet highlight

Alongside the paintings, the exhibition includes The Moon Room, a set of fifteen iPad paintings created in Normandy in 2020. Made outdoors at night, these works capture moonlight with an immediacy that would be impossible in traditional paint. The glow, the soft shadows and the delicate lines all come from working with a backlit screen in the dark.

There’s a quiet magic to these pictures. If you know his iPad drawings from the Yorkshire Wolds years, this is their nocturnal cousin. You can feel the influence of Van Gogh, but the mark-making is unmistakably Hockney. He said of the process:

“We put all the lights off in the house 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.”

A new home for Annely Juda

This exhibition also marks a huge moment for the gallery itself. After decades on Dering Street, Annely Juda Fine Art has moved to a Grade II listed Georgian building at 16 Hanover Square. The new space features two large floors with a beautiful glass-domed ceiling, making it a perfect fit for Hockney’s large-scale work. The gallery’s legacy stretches back to 1968, and this new chapter feels ambitious and future facing.