David Hockney
£25.00
David Hockney – Fondation Louis Vuitton, France
9 May — 31 Aug 2025
David Hockney 25
Exposure – From 09.04.2025 to 31.08.2025
“Do remember they can’t cancel the Spring”
In spring 2025, from April 9 to August 31, the Foundation invites David Hockney, one of the most influential artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, to occupy all of its exhibition spaces. This exceptional presentation of more than 400 works from 1955 to 2025 brings together, in addition to a major collection from the artist’s studio and his foundation, loans from international, institutional, and private collections.
The exhibition brings together creations made using a wide variety of techniques – oil and acrylic paintings, ink, pencil and charcoal drawings, as well as digital works (photographic, computer, iPhone and iPad drawings) and video installations.
David Hockney was fully involved in the creation of this exhibition. After presenting the “legendary” works of his early years, he chose to open the exhibition with the last twenty-five years of his work, thus offering an immersion into his world, spanning seven decades of creation. He personally supervised the design of each sequence and each room, in an ongoing dialogue with his assistant Jonathan Wilkinson.
“This exhibition is particularly important to me because it’s the biggest I’ve ever had—all eleven galleries of the Fondation Louis Vuitton! Some of my very latest paintings, which I’m currently working on, will be there. It’s going to be good, I think.”
The exhibition ” David Hockney 25 ” demonstrates how recent years have demonstrated the constant renewal of his subjects and modes of expression. The artist’s ability to constantly reinvent himself through new media is truly exceptional. Initially a draftsman, a master of all academic techniques, he is now a champion of new technologies.
As a preamble, emblematic works from the 1950s to the 1970s are brought together on the pool floor – from his beginnings in Bradford ( Portrait of My Father , 1955), then in London, to California. The swimming pool, an emblematic theme, appears with A Bigger Splash , 1967 and Portrait of An Artist (Pool with Two Figures) , 1972. His series of double portraits is represented by two major paintings: Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy , 1970-1971 and Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy , 1968.
Nature then took an increasingly important place in David Hockney’s work from the 1980s to the 1990s – as evidenced by A Bigger Grand Canyon , 1998 – before the artist returned to Europe to continue exploring familiar landscapes.
The heart of the exhibition then returns to the last 25 years, spent mainly in Yorkshire where he rediscovered the landscapes of his childhood, as well as in Normandy and London. We witness a celebration of Yorkshire, the artist making a hawthorn bush a spectacular explosion of spring ( May Blossom on the Roman Road , 2009). Observing the rhythm of the seasons leads him to the monumental winter landscape painted on the motif, exceptionally loaned by the Tate in London, Bigger Trees near Warter or/or Painting on the Motif for the New Post-Photographic Age , 2007.
At the same time, David Hockney continues to portray his loved ones, in acrylic or on iPad, punctuated by several self-portraits. The exhibition includes around sixty of these in gallery 4, associated with “flower portraits” made on iPad but inserted into traditional frames, creating a confusion whose effect is found in the arrangement that brings them together on the wall, 25th June 2022, Looking at the Flowers (Framed) , 2022.
The entire first floor – galleries 5 to 7 – is dedicated to Normandy and its landscapes. The series 220 for 2020 , executed exclusively on iPad, is presented in a unique installation in gallery 5. Hockney captures, day after day, season after season, the variations in light. In gallery 6, following this collection, we note a series of acrylic paintings and the very singular treatment of the sky animated by vibrant touches, a distant evocation of Van Gogh. In gallery 7, a panorama composed of twenty-four ink drawings ( La Grande Cour , 2019) echoes the Bayeux Tapestry.
Finally, the top floor is introduced by a series of reproductions dating back to the Quattrocento, which constitute important references for the artist ( The Great Wall , 2000). Hockney’s painting, which draws on the universal history of art since Antiquity, is focused here on European painting, from the early Renaissance and Flemish painters to modern art. The first part of gallery 9 bears witness to this dialogue with Fra Angelico, Claude le Lorrain, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Picasso… Then, the public is invited to cross the space of this gallery-studio transformed into a dance and music room, as David Hockney regularly does, welcoming musicians and dancers into his home.
Passionate about opera, Hockney wanted to reinterpret his stage creations since the 1970s in a polyphonic creation that is both musical and visual, in collaboration with 59 Studio, enveloping the visitor in the Foundation’s most monumental room (gallery 10).
The exhibition closes with an intimate room where the most recent works painted in London, where the artist has been living since July 2023 (gallery 11), will be revealed. These particularly enigmatic works are inspired by Edvard Munch and William Blake: After Munch: Less is Known than People Think , 2023, and After Blake: Less is Known than People Think , 2024, where astronomy, history and geography meet a form of spirituality, in the artist’s own words. He wanted to include his very last self-portrait.
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