By Tessa Nolan
When David Hockney’s Bigger Christmas Trees illuminated the twin north chimneys of Battersea Power Station on the evening of 1 December 2023, the display lasted ten minutes before looping again. The audience – shoppers, commuters, families drifting along the south bank of the Thames – watched two enormous Christmas trees, drawn on an iPad Pro in greens and purples with gold stars at their peaks, rendered across 100 metres of art deco brickwork. It was, by any measure, spectacular. It was also, as we now know with the weight of his passing on 11 June 2026, one of the final public statements an artist would make.
Hockney was 86 when he unveiled the Battersea commission. He had already delivered two major London exhibitions that autumn: Drawing from Life at the National Portrait Gallery and the immersive Bigger & Closer (Not Smaller & Further Away) at Lightroom. But Bigger Christmas Trees was something different – not a gallery show, not a ticketed experience, but a free spectacle thrown open to the city. “Battersea Power Station is such a beautiful building,” Hockney said at the time. “I wanted to decorate it in a way that I hoped would bring joy and hope to Londoners.” Those words now read as both a mission statement and a valediction.
A Building That Demands to Be Painted
Battersea Power Station has been a magnet for artists since its construction between 1929 and 1941. Designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott – the same architect behind the red telephone box and Bankside Power Station, now Tate Modern – the building once supplied one-fifth of London’s electricity. Its four white chimneys, each roughly 100 metres tall, are among the most recognisable silhouettes on the south bank. When it closed in 1983, the structure spent decades in limbo before its redevelopment as a mixed-use complex. Apple’s United Kingdom headquarters now occupy the upper floors.
It was Apple’s presence that made Bigger Christmas Trees possible. Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, called the installation “a beautiful Christmas gift for the people of London” and described it “a privilege” that Hockney chose the iPad for his work. Simon Murphy, then CEO of Battersea Power Station Development Company, framed the commission as a continuation of the building’s cultural lineage: “Battersea Power Station has been a source of inspiration for many artists for over 90 years, and we are thrilled to be working with Apple to continue this legacy with a festive animation from David Hockney.”
The technical execution was formidable. Hockney drew the trees using an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, but the leap from tablet screen to 100-metre projection required a bespoke pipeline. Reflex Arc, the digital studio that had maintained a custom iPad app for Hockney and his team, built a new export feature that extracted brush strokes and layers at high resolution, preserving transparency so the animation could be composited and replayed at building scale. Projection design and technical delivery were handled by 59 Studio, led by project director Mark Grimmer. The animation ran nightly from 5pm to 10.30pm throughout December, looping continuously until Christmas Day.
The iPad as a Paintbrush, Not a Gimmick
To understand why Bigger Christmas Trees matters, you have to understand Hockney’s relationship with technology – which was never ornamental. He began experimenting with digital tools in 2007, using the first iPhone to sketch and send drawings to friends. By the time the iPad arrived, he had already spent years working with fax machines, Polaroid composites, and photocollage. The tablet was simply the next surface on which to think.
During the Covid-19 lockdown in Normandy, where Hockney had settled in 2019 with his partner Jean-Pierre Goncalves de Lima, he produced over 100 iPad paintings depicting the progression of spring around his farmhouse. The resulting work, A Year in Normandie, stretched nearly 300 feet and was inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry. When it was shown at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris in 2025, his message – “Do remember they can’t cancel the spring” – was emblazoned in neon across the building’s facade. The Serpentine Galleries in London exhibited it in March 2026, in a show curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist. “He always wanted to show A Year in Normandie in London because it’s never been seen here,” Obrist told Euronews. “It’s a magnum opus.”
The Battersea commission distilled that same philosophy into a populist format. Where A Year in Normandie rewarded patient, sustained looking, Bigger Christmas Trees operated on the logic of the city – brief, luminous, impossible to miss. It was art that did not require a ticket, a reservation, or even an interest in art. It simply appeared, night after night, on the side of a building that belonged to everyone.
Public Art as Common Ground
The installation arrived at a moment when London’s relationship with public art was being renegotiated. The city’s permanent collection – from Anthony Gormley’s Another Place on Crosby Beach to Anish Kapoor’s ArcelorMittal Orbit in Stratford – had long established the principle that significant art could live outside institutional walls. But seasonal and temporary commissions remained contentious. Critics questioned whether a corporate partnership with Apple compromised artistic independence, or whether projecting onto a commercial development blurred the line between public art and advertising.
Hockney’s response, characteristically, was to sidestep the debate entirely. His interest was in the building itself – its scale, its history, its position on the river – and in the act of looking at it differently. The trees were not branding. They were decoration in the oldest sense: an artist dressing a building for a celebration. The choice of Christmas trees – perhaps the most universal of festive symbols – ensured that the work spoke to the widest possible audience. You did not need to know who David Hockney was to feel the pleasure of seeing a 100-metre Christmas tree bloom across the Battersea skyline.
This was consistent with a career that had always sought to collapse the distance between art and life. The swimming pools of the 1960s and 1970s – A Bigger Splash (1967), Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1971) – were not just formal exercises but invitations to inhabit a world of light and leisure. The Yorkshire landscapes of the 2010s were painted on enormous canvases precisely because Hockney wanted the viewer to feel immersed, to lose the frame. Bigger Christmas Trees applied that same logic to architecture. The frame was the building. The viewer was the city.
The Legacy of Looking
David Hockney died at his London home on 11 June 2026, one month short of his 89th birthday. King Charles III called him “a giant of the world of art and painting, a Yorkshireman through and through, and a dear friend and inspiration to so many.” Tate Britain director Alex Farquharson praised an “endlessly inventive artist” who “taught us about the joy of looking, seeing things the rest of us failed to notice.” Plans are already under way for a multimedia installation in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall to mark what would have been his 90th birthday in 2027.
In the weeks since his death, the full scope of Hockney’s output has come into sharper focus: over 400 solo exhibitions across six decades, a body of work spanning painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, opera and ballet set design, and digital art. He turned down a knighthood in 1990, accepted Queen Elizabeth II’s Order of Merit in 2012, and turned up to a Buckingham Palace luncheon in yellow Crocs. He was, as his publicist described him, “a committed life-long and defiant smoker” who “smoked up to the end.”
But for all the gallery retrospectives and auction records – Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold at Christie’s in 2018 for $90.3 million – it is the public works that may prove most enduring. Bigger Christmas Trees was not Hockney’s most conceptually complex piece. It was, however, one of his most generous: a ten-minute loop of hand-drawn festive joy, projected at monumental scale, free to anyone who happened to be walking past. In a career defined by the insistence that looking is a form of love, the Battersea commission was a love letter to a city – and, in retrospect, to all of us.
Further reading: Art · Culture · David Hockney, Britain’s Most Beloved Artist, Dies at 88
