A major new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery has unveiled David Hockney’s latest work, a sprawling composite portrait titled *A Peaceful, Gay Paradise*, which critics are already hailing as a landmark moment in British art. The piece, a 12-panel photographic collage spanning four metres, depicts a sun-drenched domestic scene in Los Angeles, featuring the artist’s longtime partner and a circle of friends. Hockney, 86, described it as an explicit celebration of same-sex love and British creative freedom.
The work is deeply personal. It shows a garden party with a pool, citrus trees and easels, the light a trademark Californian gold. But the title is deliberately political. Hockney said the painting was intended to counter rising homophobia and defend the legacy of British openness. “I wanted to show what a peaceful, gay paradise looks like,” he told the gallery’s director. “It’s a quiet act of defiance.”
The exhibition, which opens to the public on Tuesday, is the gallery’s most ambitious Hockney retrospective in decades. Curators have arranged 150 works across 10 rooms, tracing his evolution from Yorkshire landscapes to opera set designs. But the new collage is the centrepiece, positioned alone in the final room. It is the first time Hockney has produced a major new work specifically for the Portrait Gallery.
Art historians have already begun to debate its place in the canon. Sarah Howgate, the gallery’s senior curator of contemporary collections, said the piece was “quintessentially Hockney” in its layering of colour, space and emotion. But she also noted its restraint. “There is no explicit eroticism. It is more about companionship and quiet joy. That is its radical power.”
The work has drawn immediate comparisons to Hockney’s earlier pool paintings, but with a clearer autobiographical charge. Where *Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)* from 1972 was about yearning, this new work is about contentment. The figures are older, the scene domestic, the mood settled. It is, in many ways, a culmination of a lifetime’s meditation on light and love.
Reaction has been swift. Social media praised the work as a powerful rebuttal to political attacks on LGBTQ+ rights. Critics have noted the timing: the exhibition coincides with a government review of hate crime legislation and a spike in anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric online. Hockney himself has been characteristically blunt. “Art can be political without being ugly,” he said.
The exhibition runs until 14 January. Tickets have sold out for the first month. The gallery has extended evening openings to meet demand. Hockney, who still works daily in his Normandy studio, has said he will not attend the opening. “I’d rather paint,” he said.
