The pleasure principle: David Hockney at Nottingham Contemporary

Two weeks just to paint the splash … David Hockney’s A bigger Splash at Nottingham Contemporary. Photograph: David Sillitoe

Joyous, funny and inventive, David Hockney’s early work was his bravest and his best. What better way to launch Britain’s newest art gallery?

Buildings that are big on architecture are often pretty lousy when it comes to showing art. The problem with fancy architects is that they think their buildings are the art. Nottingham Contemporary, which opens on Saturday, happens to be a series of interconnected boxes and a bunker; its entire lower floor is dug into the sandstone cliff on which the building is perched. But it isn’t a boring building, and the galleries are well-proportioned, flexible spaces. Their scale feels good.

The architects Caruso St John, who also built the New Art Gallery in Walsall, recognise that the art isn’t there just to decorate the architecture. Their work is ingenious when it comes to solving the practical problems of the site, and each of the four, top-lit galleries has its own character. One of them is double height, and the skylights themselves are grids of small, white truncated pyramids. These remind me of the “sky rooms” of the artist James Turrell, with each isolated patch of sky a glowing, fugitive rectangle whose light is gently diffused into the building.

As you approach, it takes a while for the building to reveal itself, the interesting way it straddles the scarp, and the ways the exterior and interior flow and interconnect. Patterns from a sample of 19th-century lace decorate the scalloped concrete walls. I am less keen on the lime-and-gold anodised detailing, which makes the building look like a packet of Benson & Hedges.

Read more at The Guardian: The pleasure principle