This painting marks the most developed stage yet in Hockney’s dedication to ‘reverse perspective’ in paint. In this recent canvas, which depicts a colourful interior scene of flowers on a table and two chairs, he disrupts planar perspective and engineers multiple vanishing points in a single picture. The result is an enveloping pictorial space that brings us closer to the lived experience of perception. A collaged photograph depicts a view to an exterior garden and highlights the painterly versus the photographed.

David Hockney became known as a central figure of British art in the 1960s and continues to be widely celebrated as one of the most influential artists of our time. For decades, Hockney has observed that traditional linear perspective in art and photography doesn’t reflect how humans actually see: we have peripheral vision, we move and we constantly generate multiple viewpoints. Viewing is therefore not static, but dynamic and experiential. It’s not an inversion of perspective that interests Hockney, but an expansion of the possibilities of representation.