‘David Hockney 25’ in Paris: contained in the artist’s most talked-about present

It was in 2020, whereas isolating in his Normandy home, that David Hockney used the phrase, ‘Do bear in mind, they will’t cancel the spring’, a reminder that sat alongside the drawings of daffodils he was sending to his buddies to cheer them up.

A equally resolute, vibrant homage to the sensible relentlessness of life additionally lies on the coronary heart of Hockney’s largest ever exhibition, on the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. Greater than 400 of his works, created between 1955 and 2025, are featured, bringing collectively a wide range of mediums, from oil and acrylic portray, pencil and charcoal drawings to digital works, together with these created on an iPad, and video installations.

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

Hockney’s earliest works are included right here. Portrait of my Father (1955), created throughout his youth in Bradford, West Yorkshire, segues into work from the years he spent in London and California. Right here, additionally, are the strikingly easy traces of Hockney’s swimming swimming pools, their brilliant, flat surfaces stripping the scenes again to a joyful hedonism. The blossoming of his distinctive figurative type takes form in portraits, a few of buddies, a few of these near him because the artist explored his homosexuality.

It’s Hockney’s later profession that’s the focus all through, nevertheless, with specific consideration paid to work created over the past 25 years. Frank Gehry’s 11 galleries at Fondation Louis Vuitton, taking the type of wind-blown glass sails billowing in the direction of the neighbouring Jardin d’Acclimatation, are a light-filled foil for Hockney’s nature path, winding its manner across the constructing’s fluid flooring plan.

Nature blooms in all its glory. Landscapes might have at all times been current in Hockney’s oeuvre, however right here they’re omnipresent, a transfer that may be traced again to the Nineties, when Hockney started to spend extra time in Yorkshire, away from his Los Angeles dwelling, ultimately returning to settle there in 1999 after the loss of life of his mom. The seasons start to look in his work, an antidote to the persistent California solar. References to classical English landscapes by JMW Turner and John Constable turn into intertwined with a riot of daring color.

We see it once more within the work Hockney created through the 4 years he spent in Normandy, from 2019 to 2023. In 2020, he tasked himself with bringing 220 views to life. Taking only a small space to check, Hockney paperwork the altering seasons but in addition the trivialities of each day life, the small gradients in color of the vividly painted sky bringing to thoughts a imaginative and prescient of Hockney, out at nightfall or daybreak, revelling within the ‘Englishness’ of his French environment.

There’s a room devoted to a sequence of nocturnal works: hushed, shrouded in darkness, Hockney’s moon glows, an emblem of permeance he returns to time and again. Using the iPad makes this repetition seamless, a indisputable fact that doesn’t take away from the respect the works are afforded, framed just like the work.

The later works can take sudden varieties. Hockney loves music, incorporating the attire of the stage into his work from the Sixties onwards, with characters, costumes, curtains and units turning into common motifs. In new creation Hockney Paints the Stage, he rethinks his drawings as musical performances, embodying a riot of color and motion.

This curiosity in eclectic mediums might be seen within the Normandy work too. In 2018, Hockney was returning to the world, heading to Bayeux to see Queen Matilda’s tapestry, one thing he was repeatedly drawn again to. Whereas there, he determined to remain and paint the seasons. Le Grande Cour, created the next yr, consists of 24 ink drawings, displayed as a panorama in a tribute to the Bayeux tapestry. The outcome eschews sacred and spiritual motifs, specializing in the simplicity of the weather. Vehicles within the storage, fruit timber, a stream – we’re removed from the acrid desert panorama now.

‘Do bear in mind, they will’t cancel the spring’, Hockney says once more, within the subtitle of the exhibition, and in his most up-to-date self-portrait, Play inside a Play inside a Play and Me with a Cigarette. It’s a full circle second for Hockney – splendidly attired in a tweed go well with, work on his knee, sitting within the backyard, and the daffodils are bobbing up throughout him.

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