Biggest David Hockney exhibition ever opens in Paris featuring around 400 artworks

Increasingly frail but with undimmed passion, Britain’s David Hockney has put aside his health worries to shape in Paris what he describes as the biggest exhibition of his vast career. With around 400 works over four floors, drawn from museums and private collections worldwide, the exhibition at the Louis Vuitton Foundation is a stunning tribute to one of the world’s bestselling living artists. Although titled “David Hockney 25” and mostly focused on the last quarter-century of his life, it also contains paintings from his early career, as well as his blockbuster time in California in the 1960s. In the last of 11 rooms there are several unseen creations from the past two years, including a self-portrait in acrylic and a striking meditation on the afterlife inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy. “[The show] has enabled him to look back in a positive way,” said Norman Rosenthal, guest curator and a long-time friend of Hockney, ahead of its opening to the public on April 9. “He’s very, very happy with the exhibition.” Hockney, 87, insisted on overseeing the show, even taking an interest in the colour of the walls and sending back corrections for the texts written to inform visitors. “He says it is the biggest exhibition of his career,” Louis Vuitton Foundation curator Suzanne Pagé said. “He’s been very involved.” Born in 1937 to working-class parents in the northern English town of Bradford, Hockney has painted everything from the fields of his native Yorkshire to the sun-soaked private homes of California. The Paris show includes an entire room of portraits, as well as vivid landscapes, the monumental 12-metre-wide (39-foot) Bigger Trees Near Warter (2007), dozens of still lifes, self-portraits, and memorable moonlight scenes that he produced while living in Normandy, northern France, from 2019 to 2023. There are touches of his trademark humour. In his most recent self-portrait he is smoking a cigarette and wearing a yellow badge that reads “End Bossiness Soon”. The subtitle for the exhibition reprises a line he wrote to friends during the Covid-19 lockdowns when sending them pictures from Normandy: “Do remember they can’t cancel the spring.” But there are also hints of a man in his twilight years contemplating his mortality – and perhaps his last major show. An evolving digital creation of a sunrise in Normandy, which he produced like many others on his iPad, concludes with a quotation from French writer Francois de La Rochefoucauld. “Remember you cannot look at the sun or death for very long,” it reads. Louis Vuitton Foundation president Bernard Arnault wrote in an introduction to the exhibition: “[Hockney] shows us the way, while recognising that the path that he himself has followed is continually evolving.” Now in a wheelchair and with 24-hour care at his home in London, Hockney told The New York Times in a recent interview that he was grateful to be alive. “Even last year, I thought I wouldn’t be here,” he said. “But I still am.” He travelled to Paris ahead of the opening this week and was spotted around the elaborate Frank Gehry-designed Louis Vuitton Foundation museum wearing one of his classic colourful tweed suits. Having steadily lost his hearing in recent decades, he stayed in a private room during the opening party, which was attended by French first lady Brigitte Macron among other VIPs. Some of his more recent works, including the iPad renderings from Normandy, have drawn mixed reviews, but the exhibition also contains some of the classics from his portfolio that are usually in private hands. These include the enigmatic Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), which depicts Hockney’s former lover staring into a Californian pool. The 1972 painting sold for US$90.3 million at auction in New York in 2018, briefly setting a record for a living artist. In 2024, six paintings by Hockney appeared in a list of the top 100 most valuable works acquired at auction that year, according to data from the art market consultancy Artprice. Rosenthal, one of Britain’s most respected art figures, compares Hockney with Picasso. “Not because he’s the same, but because of the scale of his work, and the imagination, and the total achievement is not dissimilar,” he says. “I think this exhibition proves that his work over 60 years has a level that never changes. There’s incredible variety and yet amazing consistency.” And Hockney continues to produce. “He’s reached a certain age and he’s aware of it,” Rosenthal said. “He’s a great smoker but I think he wants to go on. “He paints every day … He’s painted the two nurses who are with him.” “David Hockney 25” ends on August 31. Additional reporting by Reuters

Biggest David Hockney exhibition ever opens in Paris featuring around 400 artworks

The Louis Vuitton Foundation show is a stunning tribute to one of the world’s bestselling living artists, and includes iPad creations