HOCKNEY/ PARICIO: CYCLE OF RENEWAL EXHIBITION
An exciting exhibition featuring artwork by David Hockney and Pedro Paricio has opened at Halcyon.
The show explores how both artists draw inspiration from their surroundings, lived experiences, and art history through the lens of cycles of renewal.
Photo Credit: Halcyon Gallery
Hockney / Paricio: Cycles of Renewal presents the work of David Hockney (British, b. 1937) and Pedro Paricio (Spanish, b. 1982), placing their practices in dialogue. It explores how both artists draw inspiration from their surroundings, lived experiences, and art history.
As London enters the season of rebirth, this exhibition invites us to consider artistic inspiration through the lens of cycles of renewal, where creativity is a process of perpetual regeneration, in which each expression of an idea or theme is both a continuation of what came before and a step toward something new. Just as spring brings new life from existing roots, art thrives on cycles of growth, renewal and reinvention. The exhibition showcases portraiture, still lifes and landscapes by both artists, demonstrating points of convergence and divergence in their approaches to subject and style.
In a career spanning seven decades, Hockney is among the most celebrated living artists of our time. Throughout his ever-evolving career, he has consistently reinvented his artistic practice, innovating and experimenting with new approaches at every stage. By showcasing a diverse range of media, including iPad drawings, computer drawings, lithographs, and etchings, Cycles of Renewal encourages visitors to reflect on Hockney’s relentless drive towards innovation and consider how the adoption of new artistic methods has shaped his creative output.
Photo Credit: Halcyon Gallery
For Paricio, engagement with art-historical traditions is central to his practice.Cycles of Renewalpresents Paricio’s newest body of paintings, which reinterpret some of Hockney’s most iconic subjects. Rendered in kaleidoscopic patterns, this body of work highlights Paricio’s ability to distil Hockney’s subjects and reimagine them through an expressive approach to colour and form. In teaching the artist how to see in new ways, Hockney’s gaze becomes part of Paricio’s, just as Cézanne’s became part of Picasso’s, and Picasso’s of Hockney’s, in a chain of influence that stretches back throughout the history of art.
Paricio considers his practice as an artist to be a profound commitment, describing it as something 'to live and die with'; the ultimate expression of humanity’s fundamental impulses is the desire to understand and to represent. Seeing Hockney as 'the last living painter in the tradition of the great masters of painting’, the British artist has profoundly influenced Paricio’s artistic vision.
Photo Credit: Halcyon Gallery
Hockney and Paricio are both shaped by their natural environment. In 1964, Hockney moved from England to Los Angeles. The move transformed him and his artwork forever. The power of landscape appears in Hockney’s later works, marked by his homecoming to Yorkshire in the late 1990s and his time in Normandy during the COVID-19 pandemic. Cycles of Renewal exhibits examples from Hockney’s celebrated Arrival of Spring, Road Near Kilham and Normandy works. Through his sensitivity for observation and invention, these iPad and digital works reimagine the centuries-old artistic practice of working en plein air.
Paricio’s connection to the natural landscape derives from his home island of Tenerife, where the island’s diverse landscape of volcanoes, laurel forests, and sandy beaches forms a bold and vibrant backdrop for its inhabitants. The colours of this terrain echo across Paricio’s bold and dramatic landscapes, such as Pacific Coast, Canyon, and Timber Line. Paricio’s Canyon is exhibited alongside Hockney’s 1993 screenprint, Slow Rise, inviting a direct dialogue between the two works. Similarly, in Timber Line, Paricio pays homage to Hockney’s gigantic multi-canvas work Winter Timber, which was exhibited at the artist’s major retrospective in 2025 at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. Together, these works invite reflection on the artists’ efforts to push boundaries through their execution of colour and form.
Inspired by Hockney’s iconic pool paintings, Paricio’s Pool series demonstrates how influence can be absorbed and transformed. Building on this foundation, Paricio introduces his signature geometric forms into the subject and refreshes Hockney’s themes with new, innovative interpretations. The development culminates in the artist’s monumental triptych, Pool with Two Figures on a Landscape. Borrowing schematically from Hockney’s seminal painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), Paricio reimagines this distinguished poolside scene using his acute artistic sensibilities.
Photo Credit: Halcyon Gallery
Further moments of dialogue find expression in Paricio’s Tulip series, and Hockney’s floral iPad drawings. While Hockney’s digital works reveal his continual experimentation with technology and form, Paricio’s paintings reinterpret classic still-life elements through vibrant colour and abstraction, highlighting how each artist uniquely reimagines a traditional subject.
Photo Credit: Halcyon Gallery
Other works in the exhibition include the Moving Focus series, in which we encounter Hockney’s examination of perspective inspired by Renaissance fixed-viewpoint paintings and principles of Chinese scroll painting. The Moving Focus series is one of Hockney’s most self-referential series to date. While there is a clear link to his photographic works, he also engages with art history, incorporating iconic motifs, such as the chair, that allude to his artistic predecessors, such as Vincent van Gogh. At its core, Cubism shapes these images, encouraging viewers to delve deeper and explore the layered narratives within.
Hockney / Paricio: Cycles of Renewal free exhibition at Halcyon’s flagship gallery 148 New Bond Street.