David Hockney at Nottingham Contemporary

The new kid on the block among the public art galleries currently revitalising the English Midlands is Nottingham Contemporary, launching with an exhibition that announces a distinctive, exciting national presence. David Hockney 1960-1968: A Marriage of Styles, is a sexy, funny, scholarly show that looks extremely relevant, in its pluralism, playfulness and range of reference, to painting today. A compelling overview of the artist’s boisterous young work, it heralds too this museum’s intention to present contemporary work historically, and to situate art from the past in a 21st-century context.

‘The First Marriage (A Marriage of Styles I)’ (1962)

Hockney, the most virtuoso draughtsman since Picasso, has always, like Picasso, needed to test new styles to resist his easy brilliance, while exploring the possibilities and limits of representation. Like Picasso too, he underlines a formal agenda with an exuberant autobiography in paint: self-portraits and portraits of lovers, family, friends; familiar interiors and landscapes; fleeting visual recollections. One, of a visit to Berlin’s Pergamon Museum when he got separated from his companion only to glimpse him at a distance alongside an Egyptian figure, sparked “The First Marriage (A Marriage of Styles I)” (1962), which gives this exhibition its title.

The modern groom in striped suit is depicted in expressive, gestural idiom; the bride is a rigid statue. A Gothic window, nodding at the ecclesiastical connotation of marriage, floats in the foreground; news-paper fragments are roughly over-painted; rainbow-hued fronds of a palm tree and the sun’s discs are painted straight on to raw canvas in the manner of Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis. Silhouette and outline, linear simplicity, frontality and absence of perspective all recall the origins of western image-making in ancient Egypt, which Hockney overlays with quotations from American abstraction. At 24, he is already co-opting diverse currencies to his own purposes; here too is the visual wit and fascination with human relationships that would lead him to reinvent the conversation piece for the hippy era and, often and brilliantly, to queer it.

Hockney had first visited America a year before, with instant results. The earliest “Love Paintings” here, from 1960 – “Going to be a Queen for Tonight”, “The Third Love Painting” – are very European, their art brut surfaces and graffiti marks indebted to Dubuffet, but as soon as Hockney hits New York, a new energy and inventiveness appears. “I’m in the Mood for Love” is a wicked self-portrait of the artist as a horny devil clutching a phallic skyscraper. At one window, a couple embrace; below, the artist’s arm extends into a pointer, borrowed from subway direction displays, reading “to Queens uptown” – a gay in-joke. Composed as a diary entry, with dates and even the temperature (95°F), of Hockney’s arrival in the city and hopes for a hot night there, the picture draws you in as a personal memory: a riposte to the heroic universality of American abstraction.

‘Man in Shower in Beverly Hills’ (1964)

Completed the same year, “We Two Boys Together Clinging”, with references ranging from pop to 19th-century poetry, is a masterpiece of sexual and artistic subversion. The title, and the verses inscribed on the canvas, come from Walt Whitman, poet and prophet of homosexual expressiveness. The blocky kissing figures on spindly legs, though the barest articulations of the human body, have an erotic, vital presence; the surrounding abstract brushwork contrasts with scrawled words and hearts. Prominent is the number 4.2 – for Doll Boy (D and B being the fourth and second letters in the alphabet), Hockney’s code for his pin-up Cliff Richard, after the hit song “Living Doll”.

The literary aspect of Hockney makes him an illustrator of genius. In beautiful, languid illustrations to lyrical poems of homosexual encounter by Constantine Cavafy, his economical lines complement the text’s simplicity, yet Hockney injects Cavafy’s nostalgic melancholy with something more fiercely sexual, and youthful. Gently satiric charcoal and watercolour sketches for the soldier, cleric, industrialist in “A Grand Procession of Dignitaries in the Semi-Egyptian Style”, composed as a flat, rhythmic march by church, state and capital across western civilisation, are based on Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians”. Comic etchings for “The Rake’s Progress”, relocated to the fleshpots of New York, are cautions to himself against being spoilt by early success.

Yet no sooner do you identify an English narrative tradition than Hockney turns game-playing modernist. “Portrait Surrounded by Artistic Devices” depicts his father, schematically rendered in grey, surrounded by a pyramid of cylindrical forms. Cubism, Cézanne’s cones, cylinders and spheres, and Francis Bacon – the arch framing Hockney père unanchored at the composition’s centre; the blue shadow trailing from his legs – are all referenced in this picture about picture-making, about how marks on a flat surface convey sensations of space.

The deadpan Californian paintings with which this show closes achieve greatness precisely because they are, as well as homages to sun, sex and space – painted when homosexual activity was illegal in Britain – exhilarated experiments around this question, particularly centered on the depiction of water. “Man in Shower in Beverly Hills” revisits a 300-year-old motif of European painting, the bather. “Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool”, with its Bernard Cohen-like abstract spaghetti swirls applied to describe the play of light on water, is a Hollywood fantasy of love and luxury.

The final work here and Hockney’s most iconic image, the flat, depthless, physically and psychologically uncluttered “A Bigger Splash”, is a meditation on time as well as place: how to fix in paint the momentary splash of water that cannot be frozen in time? So much of what came later in Hockney’s work – the double portraits of separateness, the composite photographs – is anticipated here that I wanted this show to go on for ever.

David Hockney 1960-1968: A Marriage of Styles’, Nottingham Contemporary, to Jan 24.

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Nottingham Contemporary: New gallery basks in lacework of light

It’s only when you get up close to the walls of Nottingham’s new art gallery that you discern a subtle filigree pattern in the concrete façade – an impression of this city’s history as a centre of the lace trade, writes Edwin Heathcote.

It is a typically provocative and engaging moment in this urbane new gallery by architects Caruso St John. The £14m Nottingham Contemporary is an intriguingly difficult building: the city-centre plot has a vertiginous 13m drop from one end to the other. The materials exude a shimmering unreality, fascinating rather than likeable; blocks are clad in green- tinged concrete and champagne- anodised aluminium. A huge overhang envelops a new public space like the canopy of a 1930s cinema, its scalloped edges evoking the playfully moulded surfaces of art deco.

The first big gallery space is top-lit through a wonderful coffered ceiling that creates its own lacework of light. This gallery leads into a yet loftier space, 10m high and focused on a soaring single roof light. Doubling up as a performance space and gallery is another huge, lozenge-shaped volume with perfect concrete walls and retractable bleachers.

This is an extremely unusual building, structurally complex and ambitious, a bold statement. Its galleries are surely now among the best the country has. This is architecture that is urbane, memorable and a little arrogant, perhaps – not instantly loveable, but then the best things rarely are.