I get excited everytime I ascend those stairs at Aviva. Not least because they’re sweeping and I enjoy a sweeping staircase.

But because without fail I know now I’m going to be stepping into a space that’s going to transform into something exciting, engaging and immersive.

With huge state-of-the-art projections and a revolutionary sound system, Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away) invites you to experience the world through David Hockney’s eyes.

Get an insight into the legendary artist’s process as you journey through six different chapters of his work, seeing the room around you light up and change.

Now a lady I know whose word I very much trust told me after the fact that when she attended the exhibition last year, the first time round, it’s best with a cushion and lying on the floor.

I see completely why.

Not to say the magic isn’t there if you’re unprepared to take the optimal position. Entering this space, as with ‘traditional’ galleries, there are benches available at different angles to perch and take a pew, a tiered platform and mezzanine of sorts, as well as the encouragement to take an agile approach to move around at will. Added to this is the me approach – taking a tiered seat then giving yourself almost whiplash as you turn your head around in awe as the art and story unfolds around, above, below yourself (martyr to the end, I chose this. I suffered for someone else’s art).

Except that I didn’t suffer at all. It was a spectacle which hit most of the senses.

Narrated and created by the now 88 year old, British artist himself, paired with an original score by Nico Muhly, the experience gives you a 3-dimensional look in every way at some of the most celebrated art, with a deep dive into the whys, the wherefores and the hows.

As images both static and moving appear in the space around, we’re immersed in a world of how the depths and vastness of the Grand Canyon cannot be faithfully photographed, but instead painted across 60 canvasses ‘A Bigger Grand Canyon’ (1998), how the 90 minute ‘Wagner Drive’ (1990), came to be and the precision with which the ‘consumer’ is taken through the Santa Monica mountains at sunset, the ever-emerging visual in perfect synchronisation with the ever-emerging literal symphony of sounds,

Alongside works such as ‘The Queen’s Window, his stage designs for operatic productions, still life’s, portraits of friends and his Dachshunds Stanley and Boodgie (please note with as much keenness and love as I did, that once again, slots are available during the exhibition for you to take your dogs)…

…what fascinated me most (and it was a close-run thing), was Hockney’s descriptions of his photo-collage works.

Fascinating are Hockney’s accounts of what he terms drawing with a camera. How he explains that time is not an illusion as we see in an image produced by multiple photographs, making up a composite of a snapshot of time – how this allows us to see how one does in life – an image growing outwards as we take in more and more of an evolving scene in front of us as it becomes realised through the collage.

And I barely touch the surface before, here we go again, I urge you to go and experience this documentary of an artist who is eclectic, experimental and ever-seeking in his ways to do what he was clearly put on this earth to do – as Hockney himself says, “his job is making pictures.”

Job well done.

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David Hockney: Bigger and Closer (not smaller & further away) is one of Three large-scale 360° immersive experiences from Lightroom running in repertory at Aviva Studios this winter alongside new shows: Tom Hanks’ The Moonwalkers and VOGUE’s Inventing the Runway (16 Dec – 11 Jan).

For further details and tickets, visit https://factoryinternational.org/whats-on/david-hockney-bigger-and-closer-not-smaller-and-further-away/