From 9 April to 31 August 2025, the Fondation Louis Vuitton will showcase the artist’s extraordinary career with the exhibition ‘David Hockney, 25’, an immersive experience featuring over 400 works. These monumental canvases, ranging from early sketches to recognised masterpieces, bear witness to his obsession with perspective and his love of vibrant colours. Alongside his partner Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima and his assistant Jonathan Wilkinson, the artist has personally overseen the selection and staging of this exceptional event. Visitors will discover his iconic masterpieces, from "A Bigger Splash" (1967) to his grand Yorkshire landscapes, as well as his vibrant portraits, whether in acrylic or digital form.
The exhibition will also highlight his work on reverse perspective, which invites us to see things differently: by challenging classical perspective through the inversion of the vanishing point, which is placed behind the viewer, thereby shifting their gaze, and encouraging the eye to move across the picture rather than plunging into it. Inspired by Chinese art and Cubism, Hockney applies this approach to his landscapes, collages and digital works, playing with movement and depth to create a total immersion, as in "Bigger Trees near Warter" (2007), where the lines do not converge towards a distant horizon but seem to advance towards the viewer.
A constant dialogue with art history
Hockney’s prolific and insatiable body of work is a perpetual conversation with the masters of the past. Like a craftsman who deconstructs conventions, the artist constantly revisits the great masterpieces.
Like Vermeer, he captures light and tranquillity in "Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy" (1970–71), where the framing and silent tension are reminiscent of "Girl with a Pearl Earring". His taste for vibrant colours and swirling lines owes much to Van Gogh, evident in "May Blossom on the Roman Road" (2009), a veritable celebration of the landscape. As for Picasso, he borrows from him the fragmentation of forms and the inverted perspective, visible in "Pearblosssom Highway" (1986) or "Bigger Trees near Warter" (2007), where space seems to reassemble itself before our very eyes.
An insatiable artist
Hockney has never stopped searching, exploring and breaking new ground. From childhood, he would doodle in the margins of his exercise books. One day, when his teacher asked him to hand in an assignment, he produced a collage of his self-portrait. Far from being told off, he received this enthusiastic response: ‘But that’s marvellous, David!’ A phrase that would shape his view of the world, giving him the freedom to follow his own path, without constraint or conformism.
Born in 1937 in Bradford to a modest family, he was marked for life by a remark from his father: ‘Children, don’t worry about what the neighbours think. ’ An invitation not to bow to social pressure, which he would carry with him throughout his life, rejecting the constraints of Pop Art and demanding absolute freedom.
He oscillates between figurative and abstract art, between traditional drawing and digital creation on an iPad. In 1960, the Picasso retrospective at the Tate Gallery taught him a vital lesson: ‘He could master every style. The lesson I take from this is that one must use them all.’ His ceaseless exploration of technology, from the photocopier to the Brushes app, bears witness to his insatiable curiosity.
The artist has never stopped painting, despite the tragedies and bereavements that have punctuated his life. The loss of close friends and the deafness that isolates him have never diminished his determination to capture the beauty of the world. Hockney has painted the world with rare intensity, as if every moment were a miracle to be seized, a fragment of eternity to be frozen on canvas.
In his work, life seems to triumph over absence, and art becomes a refuge where colour defies grief. “Why are my drawings perceived as a respite from this whirlwind of frightening news? They bear witness to the cycle of life beginning anew here, with the arrival of spring,” he confided in his correspondence with Ruth Mackenzie, former artistic director of the Théâtre du Châtelet, during the first lockdown in 2020. At that time, whilst in seclusion at his home in Normandy, Hockney drew tirelessly on the landscapes around him, celebrating the renewal of spring with infectious fervour.
His mischievous gaze, his candid smile and his insatiable energy lend him an air of eternal youth. Having fallen in love with the Normandy countryside, whose shifting light and changing seasons he captured with incredible intensity, Hockney left the French countryside in July 2023 to return to London. There, he continued his pictorial exploration, this time inspired by Munch and William Blake, in a quest that blends mystery and introspection.
His long-standing galleries, L.A. Louver in Los Angeles and Annely Juda Fine Art in London, continue to champion his prolific body of work, bearing witness to the undiminished admiration his work inspires. With ‘David Hockney, 25’, the Fondation Louis Vuitton is not merely presenting a retrospective: it invites the viewer to immerse themselves fully in the world of an artist who, at the age of 88, has lost none of his capacity for wonder.
Article written by Désirée de Lamarzelle, to be found in volume 11 of Oniriq Magazine
Translated by Bethszabee Garner
