The Bedroom Community label releases the music Nico Muhly has composed for the immersive audiovisual exhibition on David Hockney, on view in London until December.

Last January, The Lightroom, a new gallery designed especially for immersive art exhibitions, opened its doors in London, in the King’s Cross district, with an exhibition dedicated to the British painter David Hockney.

This type of exhibition is gaining ground all over the world, but what characterises this particular exhibition, titled David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller and further away) is that the immersive pictorial experience is accompanied by the artist himself, placing the context of his work, and a fifty-minute score composed by the American Nico Muhly expressly for the exhibition and the revolutionary surround sound system that the enormous space boasts. Initially planned for June, the exhibition has extended its opening dates until 3 December and today, precisely, part of Muhly’s soundtrack (five of the six pieces that make up the show, in a recording of just over half an hour in length) has been released on digital platforms, through the Icelandic label Bedroom Community, of which Muhly himself is a partner. The exhibition image illustrating the album cover is a photograph showing a fragment of A Bigger Grand Canyon, the already enormous work (consisting of sixty oil paintings that complete a surface of 207×744 centimetres) painted by Hockney in 1998 and depicting the Grand Canyon of the Colorado.

Muhly’s evocative melodies that accompany visitors on their audio-visual stroll through Hockney’s landscapes (with his extensive experience in creating film soundtracks) make sense on their own, without image, on the disc, which offers soft, delicate pieces of slow piano cadences with discreet accompanying strings.