April 9, 2025 – September 1, 2025
David Hockney 25
Seventy Years of Work at Fondation Louis Vuitton
Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France
David Hockney 25 occupied the entire Fondation Louis Vuitton with more than 400 works created between 1955 and 2025. Paintings, drawings, prints, photographic constructions, digital images and immersive video installations presented Hockney’s career as a continuous process of revision and discovery.
The scale of the exhibition made it possible to place familiar works beside less frequently seen experiments and recent production. Rather than reducing the career to swimming pools or portraits, the presentation emphasized the persistence of an artist who repeatedly reconsidered how pictures are made and how they are seen.
A Retrospective Without a Single Medium
The exhibition moved between oil and acrylic painting, pencil, charcoal, printmaking, photography, iPhone and iPad drawing and multi-screen installation.
These changes of medium were not presented as isolated chapters. They demonstrated how one visual question could move from one tool to another. A concern with perspective might appear in a photographic collage, a multipanel painting or an immersive video environment.
Hockney worked closely with the Fondation on the selection and installation, allowing the retrospective to reflect his own understanding of the relationships across the work.
Late Work and the Persistence of Looking
A substantial place was given to the final decades of Hockney’s practice. Yorkshire and Normandy landscapes, digital drawings and recent portraits showed that experimentation continued alongside the return to familiar subjects.
The late works reject the idea that repetition produces exhaustion. The same window, tree, person or season becomes different because time, light and the act of looking have changed.
Presented across the full Frank Gehry building, David Hockney 25 became one of the most comprehensive exhibitions of the artist’s career. It offered not a final fixed interpretation, but an expansive record of a practice founded on curiosity and the pleasure of sustained attention.
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