Gallery IX

Philip Sutton RA, 'In the Scented Breeze' Photo: John Bodkin/DawkinsColourHung by Stephen Chambers, this gallery is full of landscape images. And the largest wall displays a series of monumental photographic works by David Hockney. He is an artist whose career has been punctuated by a love-hate relationship with the camera. But these new images, all focused on the same stretch of road in the Yorkshire seaside town where he now lives, make full use of the photographic vision. Three of them chart the changes engendered by the advent of spring, summer and autumn. But the fourth, much larger one shows the scene in winter. It looks stark and very cold, with a substantial amount of snow covering the ground. In all these images Hockney makes us acutely aware not only of ordinary functional objects like the bus stop, but also of unusually tall lamp posts and a magnificent row of trees ranged right across the entire panoramic vista. For several years Hockney has painted Yorkshire with great zeal, and now he trains his voracious lens on the same subject.

Chambers,who believes that ‘the size of the Hockney photographs acts as a mirror, doubling the size of the gallery’, likes the relationship between these works and the neighbouring paintings by Fred Cuming: ‘They are good and unexpected south-coast landscapes. They are about light. The towers are used for drying fishing nets.’ Anthony Eyton’s paintings are far hotter, concentrating on epic, sun-baked, unpopulated locations like the Olgas in Australia. In William Bowyer’s paintings people do make an appearance, but landscape elements still play an important role as well.

• Royal Academy of Arts