A Bigger Splash

As an artist, David Hockney's work explored the continuum spanning desire and distance. He had both an architect's eye for physical space and structure and a pleasure-seeker's gift for making the sensual into something concrete. To see a Hockney was to see complex emotional portraits in the midst of iconography written in flesh and environment.

Following a devastating breakup with lover Peter Schlesinger, Hockney is adrift and unable to paint. Uncertain as to who he is, he pinballs around the world, invited on the coattails of a reputation that opened so many doors but now threatens to drag him down into the unseeable. This hallucinatory document, equal parts biography, fictional memoir and fever dream, is a masterwork of artistic unease. In the almost five decades since its release (even with the industries of documentary cinema and reality television cross-pollinating and yielding new types of fame and infamy), there is still nothing else quite like it.