David Hockney: Current

National Gallery of Victoria, St Kilda Road, Melbourne

Closes March 13, 2017

Next year David Hockney turns 80 with planned major exhibitions at the Tate in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The National Gallery of Victoria has got in early and is presenting a huge exhibition of Hockney's art from the past decade claiming to display the bewildering number of 1200 works. The "wow" factor in this exhibition is overwhelming – in scale, colour saturation and experimentation with new technologies.

Hockney burst onto the British art scene when he was in his early 20s as part of the emerging pop art movement and at the Young Contemporaries exhibitions. Like his older contemporary, Richard Hamilton, Hockney was drawn to new and experimental technologies and like Hamilton (who died in 2011), he has continued to experiment with new technologies throughout his life. After early encounters with polaroids, photocopies and fax machines for his art making, Hockney first experimented with computers in 1986, but found them slow and bulky and not much better with his second attempt in 1991. His conversion to digital technologies occurred in 2009, when he got his first iPhone, and the conversion was complete the following year when he was introduced to the iPad, on which he could draw and found it "a terrific medium", where he could work even in the dark, one with which he continues to engage today.

Hockney is a complex artist who feels the constant need to be challenged both through technique and in his conceptual framework. From an early age he could draw like an angel and now with the iPad the drawings gain a kinetic quality so that we as viewers are given privileged access to the artist's process of drawing and can follow his every stroke on the screen as the drawings take shape and are transformed before our eyes. What surprised me throughout the exhibition was the sense of intimacy in the viewer's experience as we are given undreamt of access to the artist's creative process. On many occasions I felt as if I was standing behind the artist's shoulder and watching him work.

From an early age Hockney was fascinated with our modes of visualisation – how we see things and how artists through the ages have tackled the question of transferring that which we see before us into an art object. For many years he has been obsessed with the camera obscura in its different historical manifestations and then the challenge of different schemes of perspective. Canberra's A Bigger Grand Canyon (1998), stretching over 744 centimetres, was one of his biggest experiments in applying a system of inverted perspective, so that the landscape can approach and envelop the viewer. In the exhibition in Melbourne, Hockney pushes the process further both in scale and in the conceptual framework. The Bigger Trees near Warter (2007), ironically subtitled "ou peinture sur le motif pour le nouvel age post-photographique" (or en plein air for the new post-photographic age), measuring a massive 459 centimetres by 1225 centimetres and consisting of 50 rectangular canvas panels, involves a huge tree within a wooded setting, where each panel is painted outside and from the object. The composition was photographically spliced together so that all the panels appear to seamlessly combine into a single picture. This is possibly the largest out of doors painting ever attempted. In the installation in Melbourne, photographic reproductions of the painted panel are created on the neighbouring walls to evoke an immersive experience. Personally, I found the painting itself through scale and colour pitch so intense, that the copies on the surrounding walls appeared as a bit of a distraction.

Another completely immersive and successful installation is his The Four Seasons, Woldgate Woods (2010/11) where on four large panels, we have a glimpse of the same section of the Yorkshire landscape captured in summer, autumn, winter and spring. Using a technology not dissimilar to Google streetscapes, Hockney photographed each season employing nine cameras shooting simultaneously providing a 4½-minute loop on nine split screens that combine into a single image. It is a meditative and mesmerising experience that effectively plays with the shape of time and the construct of space.

A further virtuoso demonstration of Hockney's powers is a huge installation consisting of 82 portraits & one still life (2013). After the accidental death of one of his associates, the artist started to paint portraits of his friends and colleagues asking each to pose for three days (the one who could not make it was replaced with a still life). When all displayed together against a dark burgundy background there is something quite haunting in this gallery of faces that includes familiar characters such as Barry Humphries and the artist John Baldessari. The paintings are of an uneven quality, but in this show bigger is better and within this mass of images it is the viewer, and not the curator, who selects the images on which to concentrate.

The arrangement of the exhibition, with its frequent transitions from photographic drawings, iPhone and iPad drawings, paintings, installations and moving footage, is deliberately disorientating as we are confronted by a digital canvas on one wall and a gritty and material surface of oil paint or acrylics on another. Neon intense saturation of colour at times appears painful to the eye. While the artist is omnipresent with his heightened curiosity and probing intellect, he also hides behind his creations and as an experienced chameleon adopts deliberate disguises and an endless variety of voices.

This is an exhibition where we equally feel that we are viewers and participants, where we are encountering one of the great maverick artists of our time, who refuses to age gracefully and with vigour and aggression constantly seeks to reinvent himself.