‘David Hockney 25’: inside the artist’s blockbuster Paris show

It was in 2020, while isolating in his Normandy house, that David Hockney used the phrase, ‘Do remember, they can’t cancel the spring’, a reminder that sat alongside the drawings of daffodils he was sending to his friends to cheer them up.

A similarly resolute, colourful homage to the brilliant relentlessness of life also lies at the heart of Hockney’s largest ever exhibition, at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. More than 400 of his works, created between 1955 and 2025, are featured, bringing together a variety of mediums, from oil and acrylic painting, pencil and charcoal drawings to digital works, including those created on an iPad, and video installations.

Inside ‘David Hockney 25’ at Paris’ Fondation Louis Vuitton

Hockney’s earliest works are included here. Portrait of my Father (1955), created during his youth in Bradford, West Yorkshire, segues into work from the years he spent in London and California. Here, also, are the strikingly simple lines of Hockney’s swimming pools, their bright, flat surfaces stripping the scenes back to a joyful hedonism. The blossoming of his distinctive figurative style takes shape in portraits, some of friends, some of those close to him as the artist explored his homosexuality.

It is Hockney’s later career that is the focus throughout, however, with particular attention paid to work created over the last 25 years. Frank Gehry’s 11 galleries at Fondation Louis Vuitton, taking the form of wind-blown glass sails billowing towards the neighbouring Jardin d’Acclimatation, are a light-filled foil for Hockney’s nature trail, winding its way around the building’s fluid floor plan.

Nature blooms in all its glory. Landscapes may have always been present in Hockney’s oeuvre, but here they are omnipresent, a move that can be traced back to the 1990s, when Hockney began to spend more time in Yorkshire, away from his Los Angeles home, eventually returning to settle there in 1999 after the death of his mother. The seasons begin to appear in his work, an antidote to the persistent California sun. References to classical English landscapes by JMW Turner and John Constable become intertwined with a riot of bold colour.

We see it again in the work Hockney created during the four years he spent in Normandy, from 2019 to 2023. In 2020, he tasked himself with bringing 220 views to life. Taking just a small area to study, Hockney documents the changing seasons but also the minutiae of daily life, the small gradients in colour of the vividly painted sky bringing to mind a vision of Hockney, out at dusk or dawn, revelling in the ‘Englishness’ of his French surroundings.

There is a room dedicated to a series of nocturnal works: hushed, shrouded in darkness, Hockney’s moon glows, a symbol of permeance he returns to again and again. The use of the iPad makes this repetition seamless, a fact that doesn’t take away from the respect the works are afforded, framed like the paintings.

The later works can take unexpected forms. Hockney loves music, incorporating the apparel of the stage into his work from the 1960s onwards, with characters, costumes, curtains and sets becoming regular motifs. In new creation Hockney Paints the Stage, he rethinks his drawings as musical performances, embodying a riot of colour and movement.

This interest in eclectic mediums can be seen in the Normandy work too. In 2018, Hockney was returning to the area, heading to Bayeux to see Queen Matilda’s tapestry, something he was repeatedly drawn back to. While there, he decided to stay and paint the seasons. Le Grande Cour, created the following year, is composed of 24 ink drawings, displayed as a panorama in a tribute to the Bayeux tapestry. The result eschews sacred and religious motifs, focusing on the simplicity of the elements. Cars in the garage, fruit trees, a stream – we’re far from the acrid desert landscape now.

‘Do remember, they can’t cancel the spring’, Hockney says again, in the subtitle of the exhibition, and in his most recent self-portrait, Play within a Play within a Play and Me with a Cigarette. It’s a full circle moment for Hockney – splendidly attired in a tweed suit, work on his knee, sitting in the garden, and the daffodils are springing up all around him.

‘David Hockney 25’ is at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris from 9 April to 31 August 2025, fondationlouisvuitton.fr/en

The accompanying book, David Hockney, edited by Norman Rosenthal, is published by Thames & Hudson in association with Fondation Louis Vuitton, also available from Amazon