Exhibitions review: Michael Armitage and David Hockney at the Royal Academy

The Royal Academy in London recently hosted two exhibitions: Paradise Edict by Michael Armitage and The Arrival of Spring by David Hockney (both just closed now).

The exhibitions were independent of each other, but watching both at the same time, I was intrigued by how they contrasted with each other.

On one hand, British-Kenyan artist Michael Armitage whose works are fervent and febrile and brim with life: animals, humans and spirits fill the large cloth canvases, building up a carnival of creatures, surreal and mythological.

On the other hand, David Hockney’s large iPad drawings of the Normandy scenery, deliberately childish and flat. Here the repeating patterns of trees and plants, the vibrant primary colours and the naive mark making create an almost surreal world, disconnected from the nature it represents.

Armitage paints on Lubugo, a traditional ceremonial cloth of the Baganda people. The fabric strains and rips in his works, visible holes and rough stitching creating the impression of an almost living material ageing before our eyes.

Hockney, whose work has embraced new technologies since his fax drawings in the 80s and early 90s, draws on his iPad. The paintings therefore have no texture or weight, their glossy smoothness distancing the viewer from the physical landscapes they depict.

Armitage’s work is full of creatures, their faces contorted in grimaces, their bodies twisted and exposed, people merging with animals and spirits in a dance of darkness and pain.

Hockney’s landscapes do not include a single person, and while a few houses can be seen, their emptiness disconnects them from time and location. We know they were painted last year in a few acres of Normandy, but they could be anywhere, anytime.

Armitage’s work reads almost religiously, each painting a tale or allegory for human life and its complications and suffering. 

Hockney’s paintings feel like an ode to childishness, their naivety deliberate, an attempt by an older man to return to the simple joys of childhood.

I am not always a fan of exhibitions who look for comparaisons and connections between different artists- they sometimes feel forced and artificial. Here no such attempt was made, the exhibitions were separate and self contained. And yet, that day, I left the RA feeling like I had witnessed a dialogue between two intriguing artists, across the vast rooms of the Royal Academy…

Michael Armitage