David Hockney’s Huge iPad Christmas Trees Light Up Battersea

David Hockney, Bigger Christmas Trees (2023). Animation made with iPad drawings. Courtesy Battersea Power Station.

By Sam Gaskin – 21 December 2023, London

David Hockney b. 1937, United Kingdom Follow +

David Hockney‘s Bigger Christmas Trees is now lighting up the 100-metre-tall chimneys of London‘s Battersea Power Station. The 10 minute-animation, drawn using an iPad, is displayed nightly from 5pm to 10:30pm through Christmas Day.

‘Battersea Power Station is such a beautiful building. I wanted to decorate it in a way that I hoped would bring joy and hope to Londoners,’ Hockney said.

Another artist commissioned to present a Christmas tree this year is Rachel Whiteread. Whiteread used 102 circular neon white hoops to decorate the 31-foot-tall Nordmann fir tree, which stands outside the Connaught hotel in Mayfair.

Rachel Whiteread’s Christmas tree for The Connaught. Courtesy the artist and The Connaught.

‘I chose to use circles of light—a motif that I have used before,’ Whiteread said.

‘I love the simplicity of the idea,’ she added.

The tree remains on view through the first week of January.

Kapwani Kiwanga‘s On Growth isn’t a tree at all—it’s a sculpture of a fern encased in a terrarium—but it has a distinctly Christmassy vibe.

Kapwani Kiwanga, On Growth (2023). A High Line Commission. On view November 2023–October 2024. Courtesy the High Line. Photo: Timothy Schenck.

Displayed on New York‘s High Line at Little West 12th Street through October 2024, the fern is surrounded by colour-shifting glass reminiscent of Christmas baubles.

The work references Wardian cases used to transport uprooted plants to Europe from overseas, allowing them to survive London’s cold temperatures and polluted air.

’On Growth is a mesmerising work that opens a window into a complex story about our historical and ongoing relationships with nature,’ said Cecilia Alemani, the Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Director & Chief Curator of High Line Art.

Christmas Tree and Neapolitan Baroque Crèche (detail). 20 ft. blue spruce with a collection of 18th-century Neapolitan angels and cherubs among its boughs and groups of realistic crèche figures flanking the Nativity scene at its base, displayed in the Museum’s Medieval Sculpture Hall. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Loretta Hines Howard, 1964. Courtesy © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Behind the tree: Reja from the Cathedral of Valladolid, Spanish, 1763. Wrought iron, partially gilt, and limestone. 15.86 x 12.81 m. Gift of The William Randolph Hearst Foundation, 1956.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is home to a more traditional Christmas tree. It features over 200 18th-century figures with a nativity scene at its base and angels and cherubs hanging from its branches.

Just in time for the holidays, the Met announced that it has been gifted more than 200 works of art—including pieces by Botticelli and Vincent van Gogh—by Dick Wolf, creator of the TV crime procedural Law & Order. —[O]