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When the Portland Art Museum opened its new wing in November, it thoroughly shuffled all of its galleries. Each room across the entire museum was a new show. The Black Art and Experiences Gallery (semiviewable from the tunneled glass bike path that cuts through the addition) and the large-scale sculpture display in the first-floor mezzanine produced an excitement and overwhelm the museum had struggled to achieve in its previous century of business. The grand entrance of the new Rothko Pavilion is a kind of show itself, its abundance of neatly freckled glass and natural light making a visit to the city’s largest arts institution feel on par with museums around the world. A compact but exciting show of Rothko’s paintings was among the opening programming, as was a moving video installation from Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist. But the current David Hockney show (through July 26) is PAM’s first blockbuster since its extreme makeover. 

Few living artists are as famous as Hockney. He cut his teeth as a pop artist in the 1960s, working in California and his native England. In contrast to the larger pop movement’s use of mass-market imagery in fine art (ad slogans, logos, and celebrity kitsch), Hockney depicted intimate, often personal scenes with an intensely flat and iconographic style. He made paintings that looked like ads instead of turning ads into paintings. Painter is usually the first on a list of Hockney’s trades, followed by draftsman, printmaker, stage designer, crafty MacGyver of outmoded technologies, and on and on. Now 88, he primarily works with an iPad. His digitally produced work, elaborately printed at large scale or shown on various inventive screen displays, makes up a chunk of the more than 200 works in PAM’s show, which comes from the collections of Jordan Schnitzer and his family’s foundation. But the two-story exhibition draws on more than six decades of his career. There are no traditional paintings on canvas, however. While this does leave a hole in the show’s otherwise retrospective scope, it also speaks to Hockney’s endless experiments with the textures (and often the intentional lack of texture) that printmaking, photography, and more rudimentary examples of digitized painting software can offer.  

“His work is often as hard to resist as it is to take seriously,” Roberta Smith wrote in 1996, reviewing a Hockney show for The New York Times. She placed him in the class of artists “who elicit nothing so much as ambivalence, a contradictory state in which both belief and disbelief are suspended.” There’s no denying that Hockney’s queer-coded world of sunny California pools and picturesque English countrysides engulfs you. Whether you like that world, or find his frank and silly affect or frequent overt references to other artists’ work naive or annoying, is somewhat beside the point. 

More things to do this week

Elsewhere...

• “History was made when a trans woman threw a cup of coffee at a police officer who was harassing her.” Linda Ferguson on Riot Queens, a new play from Fuse Theatre Ensemble. (Oregon ArtsWatch)
• Shrill author Lindy West on her latest memoir, Adult Braces, and her internet-famous polycule. (Willamette Week)