Though David Hockney’s major retrospectives at the Tate, the Pompidou, and the Met last year cemented his status as one of the greatest artists of our time, the breathtaking innovation on display at his new exhibit, “Something New in Painting (and Photography) [and even Printing]” is evidence that at the spry age of eighty, the man is only just getting started. The show includes eighteen new paintings on hexagonal canvases as well as two new works of computer-manipulated photography that each span a full gallery wall. As Hockney describes it, he once drove through a long tunnel under the Alps. There were no other cars, and the constancy of the road narrowing into the pinprick of light ahead, the tyranny of the one-point perspective, created an unbearable atmosphere of tension. Then the car emerged, and there were the mountains, there was the sky, there was the world, wild and unbound and everywhere around them. One painting in the show describes this with stark simplicity: the narrowing road below, the vista of mountains above. The rest capture the dizzying feeling of awe by playing with “reverse perspective,” Hockney’s technique in which the space bends, the edges fold in, and the viewer is granted the gift of peering around impossible corners and hovering over floors that reach upward. The notches on either side of each canvas are the inverse of the nose that generally interrupts our vision, a breaking open of the way we see. The show will be on view at the Pace Gallery until May 12. The colors, the sumptuous aquamarines of a Los Angeles swimming pool, the burnt sienna and iridescent yellow of the Grand Canyon, provide the perfect escape from this unrelenting New York winter. —Nadja Spiegelman
Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images North America
Dorothea Lasky’s latest collection, Milk, often feels like an optical illusion: simplicity in black-and-white, arranged so that it reveals something disorienting and complex in a way you can’t quite articulate. Each line is vibrant in itself, popping short and quick in sharply skipping staccato, individually crafted and yet still somehow seamlessly woven into the full piece. Lasky demonstrates her virtuosity time and again; like any artist truly confident in their medium, she doesn’t need much material to create a deeply stirring piece. If you’re still not sold on Lasky’s minimalist brilliance, you can take a test drive with the Review’s Spring issue, which features “A Hospital Room,” a poem from the collection. —Lauren Kane
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