Paris,
About three years ago, when five international galleries allied to exhibit their engravings dedicated to landscapes and still lifes and a piece composed of three paintings for iPad that together represented a gladiolus, David Hockney declared that what we need today, almost as an imperative need and form of survival, are Fresh images of a beautiful world.
From that perspective it is possible to read most of the production of who was, in principle, a very good cartoonist, then dominated almost all academic pictorial techniques and in recent times it has become one of the authors who have defended the creative employment of new technologies.
This spring – a period that comes as a ring to the finger – the Fondation Louis Vuitton of Paris gives him an exhibition that occupies practically all its facilities and that brings together no less than four hundred works of his dated from 1955 until this same year, some from the artist’s study and therefore less known. We will contemplate from acrylic and oil paintings to immersive video facilities, through ink, pencil and carbon and digital art drawings (works on iPhone, iPad or photographic drawings).
Hockney himself has participated very actively in the design of this retrospect, together with his partner Jean-Pierre Gonçalves of Lima and, beyond that we have the opportunity to review its evolution throughout those seven decades, both have preferred to give more relevance to their creations of the last quarter of a century and the most recent. Not so much because they can better connect with potential new audiences of their work -we can not say that their work is, in any of its stages, neither cryptic nor oblivious to the young spectator -but to emphasize the renovating vocation of the British author, his ability to reinvent himself, although he is not too much to reach the nineties.
As an introduction, the route begins, on the ground floor of the foundation, teaching us a selection of emblematic pieces dated from fifty to the seventies, including its beginnings in Bradford (My father’s portrait1955), his stay in London and, later, his time in California. The pool, one of its big songs, made its appearance already then: in Bigger Splash (1967) and Portrait of an artist (pool with two figures) (1972). Its series of double portraits is represented in Paris, also by two important works: Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy (1970-1971) and Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy (1968).
Since then and progressively, nature will be gained importance in its work in the eighties and the nineties; The Vuitton has arrived Bigger Grand Canyon (1998), which he made before returning to Europe to continue his family landscape exploration.
The core of the exhibition, as we said, turns in the last twenty -five years, in which Hockney has mainly resided in Yorkshire, Normandy and London. This period is examined in the exhibition starting with the celebration of the Naturals of the First English County: the artist painted a thorn in a spectacular spring explosion (May Blossom on The Roman Road2009) and his thorough observation of the change of stations culminated in the monumental winter landscape Bigger Trees Near Warter Or/Ou Peinture Sur Le Motif Pour Le Nouvel Age Post Photographique (2007), which has given up the Tate.
In that same period, he painted friends and family in acrylic or iPad, while working in self -portraits. In the Boulogne Bois we can enjoy some sixty of those pieces, along with lifting natures that he calls Flower portraits; Created in a digital tablet but exposed in traditional frames, these compositions have an intriguing effect, very patent in Looking at the Flowers (Framed)of 2022.
The first floor of the Foundation hosts its visions of Normandy and its landscapes, in which it often captured variations of light, spoiled with vibrant touches the skies and worked, in some cases, exclusively on iPad. If any of those creations, for the fragmentation of the touches of their brushstroke, subtly evokes Van Gogh, a twenty ink drawings (THE GREAT COUR2019) refer to the Bayeux tapestry, which described the facts prior to the Norman conquest of England.
Speaking of past roots, a series of reproductions of Quattrocento pieces that have served as references for the artist open the route on the upper floor (The Great Wall2000), making it clear that Hockney has studied both modern art and early rebirth and flamenco teachers. His ties intended with French, Claudio de Lorena, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Picasso … and the artist’s study has also been recreated, transformed into a dance room, since musicians and dancers are regularly invited to play at home.
Since he himself is passionate about opera, he wanted even reinterpreting the scenographies he has created since the seventies in a polyphonic sound creation, in collaboration with 59 Studio. Visitors will immerse themselves in that musical and visual piece in the Monumental Gallery 10.
The last room of the exhibition, the most intimate, presents its recent works, executed in London, where the artist has resides for two years. Particularly mysterious, are inspired by Edvard Munch and William Blake and in them astronomy, history and geography intersect with spirituality.
Since this anthology has a lot of self -portrait, with the last work of this genre that has done the route closes.
“David Hockney 25”
Fondation Louis Vuitton
8 Avenue du Mahatma Gandhi
Paris
From April 9 to August 31, 2025
