David Hockney 25

David Hockney 25
9th April, 2025 – 31st August, 2025
Fondation Louis Vuitton
8 Avenue du Mahatma-Gandhi
16th arrondissement of Paris, France

Spanning seven decades and more than 400 works, the exhibition “David Hockney 25” offers a rare and deeply personal portrait of an artist who continues to redefine how we see the world.

Few living artists carry the weight of a name like David Hockney. Fewer still are capable, at 87, of producing work with the same urgency and clarity that first brought them into public view. But in the spring of 2025, the Fondation Louis Vuitton will give Hockney not a gallery, but an entire building, offering the most expansive exhibition of his career to date.

Opening April 9 and running through August 31, David Hockney 25 will bring together over 400 works, spanning seven decades of a life spent looking. The exhibition presents not a linear career but a constantly shifting creative world—one where landscapes change with the seasons, portraits breathe with affection, and colour remains a trusted companion.

This exhibition means an enormous amount because it is the largest exhibition I’ve ever had – 11 rooms in the Fondation Louis Vuitton. Some of the most recent paintings I’m working on now will be included in it, and I think it’s going to be very good.

David Hockney

Hockney, alongside his longtime partner and studio manager Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, has overseen every detail. This is not a show made about Hockney—it is one made with him, structured as an unfolding journey through time, place, and memory. His hand is present in the selection, the sequencing, and the spaces themselves, each room a chapter in an ongoing visual autobiography.

The exhibition opens, fittingly, with early works from the 1950s to the 1970s: a young man discovering his eye in Bradford, experimenting with form in London, and ultimately finding sunlight in California. Paintings such as Portrait of My Father (1955), A Bigger Splash (1967), and Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972) remind us how vividly Hockney could capture stillness—and how much he could conceal beneath a surface of calm.

From there, the work turns outward. In the 1980s and ’90s, nature begins to dominate the canvas. A Bigger Grand Canyon (1998) is both a celebration of scale and a return to the artist’s deep interest in space and perspective. But it is the past 25 years—the true heart of the exhibition—that reveal Hockney not as an elder statesman, but as an artist in full flight.

In Yorkshire, he watched hedgerows blossom and fields freeze. May Blossom on the Roman Road (2009) captures spring with a kind of unfiltered joy, while Bigger Trees near Warter (2007), on loan from the Tate, gathers winter’s hush into a monumental landscape. These works show Hockney rooted in a place, attentive to time, and—despite age—more prolific than ever.

Portraiture remains a constant. In one gallery, nearly 60 likenesses—friends, family, and flowers—line the walls. Some are rendered in acrylic, others in newer mediums, but all maintain the intimacy that has long defined his gaze. In one, dated June 25, 2022, we find him simply “Looking at the Flowers”—a title as unassuming as the work is quietly profound.

Normandy occupies the next level of the exhibition, where the artist’s 2020 series, made day by day across the seasons, is displayed in a newly imagined arrangement. The skies here are alive with motion—brushstrokes that flicker and twist, recalling Van Gogh without imitation. In another gallery, a suite of ink drawings offers a slower rhythm: fields, courtyards, and trees rendered with the care of a chronicler.

Art history, too, finds a place. On the upper floor, The Great Wall (2000) introduces the artist’s lifelong dialogue with the past. Hockney draws freely from the Renaissance, the Flemish masters, and the giants of modernism—Cézanne, Lorrain, Van Gogh, Picasso—not out of deference, but companionship.

Elsewhere, a large hall is transformed into a performance space, nodding to Hockney’s decades of work in opera and stage design. Music and movement spill across the walls, echoing the atmosphere of his own home, where performers are regular guests.

The final room is small and quiet. Here are the most recent paintings, made in London, where Hockney has returned to live. They are moody, even cryptic—works such as After Munch: Less is Known than People Think (2023) and After Blake (2024) suggest a preoccupation with mystery, belief, and the long view of human history. A final self-portrait, modest and unsparing, closes the exhibition.

In David Hockney, 25, there are no curtain calls. There is only the continuing act of looking. Whether in the glare of Los Angeles sun or the gray light of Yorkshire fields, Hockney has never stopped seeing—more importantly, he has never stopped showing us how.

Curators and Catalogue

The exhibition has been organised under the direction of Suzanne Pagé, Artistic Director of the Fondation Louis Vuitton, who serves as the principal curator. She is joined by Sir Norman Rosenthal as guest curator, and François Michaud, curator at the Fondation, with assistance from Magdalena Gemra. The exhibition has been developed in close collaboration with Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima and Jonathan Wilkinson of David Hockney’s studio.

A comprehensive catalogue has been published to accompany the exhibition. Titled David Hockney and edited by Sir Norman Rosenthal, the volume brings together essays by Suzanne Pagé, James Cahill, Magdalena Gemra, Anne Lyles, François Michaud, Simon Schama, Donatien Grau, Eric Darragon, Théo de Luca, Fiona Maddocks and Philippe-Alain Michaud.

328 pages, including 484 illustrations
ISBN: 9780500029527
Published by Thames & Hudson in association with the Fondation Louis Vuitton.

David Hockney 25 opens on the 9th of April, 2025 until the 31st of August, 2025 at Fondation Louis Vuitton

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