David Hockney at Art Basel 2026: The One Booth to Cross the Fair For

♦ ♦ ♦ JUNE 18, 2026 | 3 MIN READ David Hockney at Art Basel 2026: The One Booth to Cross the Fair For At a Glance Annely Juda's Art Basel booth hangs one of Hockney's final paintings beside two from 1966 the week of his death. Cross the fair for it. Walk into Annely Juda’s booth at Art Basel this week and the first thing is yellow. A garden table lit like noon, a spray of blue delphiniums shooting out of a malachite vase, eight empty chairs pulled around it, a purple floor underneath. The painting is David Hockney’s “Delphiniums on My Garden Table, July 2025,” acrylic on canvas, 152.4 by 121.9 centimetres, made in the last summer of his life. He died on June 11, a week before the fair opened. So the brightest thing in the room is also the saddest, and nobody planned it that way. The fair runs June 18 to 21. Go. I want to be careful, because a death turns every gallery into a shrine for a few days and the market knows it. This booth earns the visit on painter’s terms anyway, and the reason is the hang. Why Annely Juda paired a 2025 still life with two 1966 satires Beside the delphiniums, the gallery hung two works from 1966, “Ubu Roi: The Polish Royal Family” and “Ubu Collecting Taxes from Peasants,” spare and theatrical and lightly absurd, a young man’s graphic wit. Then a fifty-nine-year jump to a dying colourist’s table of flowers. No tidy survey in between, no decade-by-decade wall. Just the two ends of a life, set a few feet apart. That is a real decision, and it argues something a chronological hang never could. The style changed completely. The appetite did not. The same hunger to look that staged a cardboard king in 1966 is the hunger that counted eight chairs and one vase of birthday flowers in 2025. A painter notices this, because we know how tempting it is to show the smooth arc, the steady improvement. Annely Juda refused it. They bracketed the whole man and let the gap do the talking. The style changed completely. The appetite to look never did. What the eight empty chairs do to a fair booth A booth is a hard room for a quiet painting, and a still life is about as quiet as painting gets. This one fights back, and it fights back through the chairs. Eight of them, all empty, set for people who are not in the picture. Painted a year ago they read as an invitation. Hung this week they read as absence, and the high-key Matisse colour, which would normally just feel like joy, now has a grief running under it that the yellow cannot quite cover. That tension is the work. A flat, frontal, shadowless field like this wants a stopped body in front of it and a clean wall around it, which a crowded aisle denies it. So the painting does the stopping itself. People go quiet in front of it. In a hall built for deals, a booth full of empty chairs is the one place where the looking is about loss instead of acquisition. As Artsy’s fair report put it, the booth has “taken on unexpected poignancy” since his death last week at 88. True, but it undersells th