Jacquie ManningDavid Hockney is no stranger to Australia. In 2016, the National Gallery of Victoria staged a major exhibition of the British artist’s later works. In 1999, the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) acquired one of Hockney’s most ambitious works, A Bigger Grand Canyon. Earlier this year, the NGA showcased its significant holdings of his work in the exhibition David Hockney: Portraits in Print.Now the “immersive experience” David Hockney: Bigger and Closer (not smaller and further away) has found its way to Sydney’s Carriageworks.Created by Hockney in collaboration with London production house and venue Lightroom, where it debuted in 2023, Bigger and Closer (not smaller and further away) is a four-screen documentary that traverses Hockney’s oeuvre, career and philosophy over roughly 50 minutes, featuring massive whole-of-room digital projections, a soundtrack of original music by American composer Nico Muhly and narration by the artist himself. Hockney was an early adopter of digitally-assisted drawing, using the iPad and iPhone. Jacquie Manning/Carriageworks The relatively recent death of Hockney, in June, gives this event a melancholy new context, though the work itself is far from melancholy in mood or tone. Indeed, it invites visitors to “Love Life”, a saccharine slogan also deployed in the show’s merchandise.Portrait of a prolific artistHockney in 50 minutes is a tall order. Across seven decades he was prolific and restless; at various points a draftsman, painter, stage designer, printer, poster-maker, photographer, writer and multimedia artist.He was a big and contradictory character, too. Till the end, he was simultaneously flat cap and bigger splash: the proud working class Yorkshireman and the sophisticated Los Angeles transplant, pop artist and globetrotting dandy.The diversity and experimentation at the heart of Hockney’s work are captured in both the form and the content of Bigger and Closer. Inside the show’s large rectangular space, enormous projected artworks and imagery unfurl and repeat across the space.We are reminded of Hockney’s versatility and creativity across genres at every turn. One particularly effective section features Hockney’s brilliant and witty stage designs for productions of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress and Puccini’s Turandot. Audiences get glimpses of Hockney’s process in Bigger and Closer. Jacquie Manning/Carriageworks Celebratory rather than probingOther sections are less convincing.Hockney delivers what feels like a wilfully un-fact-checked TED Talk on the use of perspective in the history of painting. It recalls his fascinating but irritating book Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Techniques of the Old Masters, which made extravagant, disputed claims about the role of the camera obscura in the work of various painters. This whole section contributes little to our understanding of Hockney or perspective.Across the narration we hear Hockney’s voice from different periods of his life, and his tone and timbre are familiar and engaging. But what he says is sometimes grating. We are treated to bland remarks (“By putting more in you get more reality”) and dubious assertions (he claims “nobody had painted LA” before he did).Even when Hockney is on firmer ground, inviting us to look closely at nature, he presents this as a new idea – as if other great artists, photographers and designers hadn’t also urged us to do exactly this over the long tradition of art-making. Hockney himself narrates the entirety of Bigger and Closer. Jacquie Manning/Carriageworks Frustratingly, we get no sense of Hockney’s engagement with the fraught politics of his times. Was he an advocate for the gay community that he painted and to which he belonged, in its struggles for equality and against oppression through the ‘60s and '70s? How did his art chronicle the AIDS crisis that affected his personal circle so profoundly? How did the social and demographic changes and struggles of his adopted city impact his work?The answers to these complex questions might take more time and critical distance to unravel and aren’t to be found in Bigger and Closer, which is celebratory in its approach.Hockney sometimes comes off as a “one-percenter” of the art world. The documentary shows him driving an open top car to the strains of Wagner, embarking on tours of Europe, editing Paris Vogue and hanging out at the opera.Spectacle without intimacyI was certainly moved at points by the sheer ambition and beauty of Hockney’s work, and this is a sophisticated and attractive technical spectacle, with its multi-screen design, digital effects and lively colour palette.But Bigger and Closer left me unsatisfied. I wanted other voices and critical views. Most of all, I yearned to encounter an artist, a body of work and a world in all their materiality and complexity.This digital spectacle is no substitute for contemplating Hockney’s sketchbooks, or encountering '70s paintings such as Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, with their unique combination of stillness and charge, renaissance allusion and hip modernity. It only hints at the humour and humanity of his collaged photographic portraits or the playfulness of his portrait series.For those not familiar with Hockney, this is an inventive gateway to his oeuvre. But while the artist is certainly bigger, we emerge no closer to truly understanding his life, his work or its place in culture.David Hockney: Bigger and Closer (not smaller and further away) is at Carriageworks, Sydney, until January 24.Mark Ledbury's work has been funded by the ARC, the Getty Foundation, and by philanthropic funding to the Power Institute at the University of Sydney including the Power Bequest.