At a Massive New David Hockney Retrospective, Spring Never Ends
At a Massive New David Hockney Retrospective, Spring Never Ends
The exhibition features more than 400 of the 87-year-old artist’s works, which are spread throughout the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris
A Bigger Grand Canyon (1998) is a 25-foot-long work spread out across 60 canvases.
Luc Castel / Getty Images
All spring and all summer long, pink neon lights strung in the shape of handwriting across the silver exterior of the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris will bear a reminder: “Do remember they can’t cancel the spring.”
These are the words of artist David Hockney, whose massive new retrospective—titled “David Hockney 25”—is on view at the foundation through August 31.
Spring is a powerful theme for Hockney. His paintings frequently depict flowering trees, grassy fields and blue swimming pools under languid skies. “When he looks at spring, it is like a child discovering it for the first time,” Suzanne Pagé, the foundation’s artistic director, tells the New York Times’ Eleanor Stanford.
But springtime has other meanings for the 87-year-old artist, who now uses a wheelchair. It represents constant curiosity and boundless creativity, even in old age.
With more than 400 works made between 1955 and 2025, Hockney's retrospective has taken over the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris.
Luc Castel / Getty Images
With more than 400 of his works on display across the foundation’s Frank Gehry-designed building, it’s easy to see Hockney’s devotion to art, experimentation and change.
Hockney, 87, at the retrospective's opening
Luc Castel / Getty Images
One of the earliest works on view in the exhibition, Portrait of My Father (1955), was the first painting Hockney ever sold. The most recent pieces are from 2025, including “some of the very last paintings I’m working on now,” Hockney says in a statement.
The artist collaborated with organizers at the foundation to plan the sweeping showcase of his work. Even with an entire museum at their disposal, they had to make difficult cuts. As Norman Rosenthal, the exhibition’s curator, tells the Times, “We could double it in size, and still use all different works.”
After all, Hockney’s career has stretched across seven decades. He was born in Bradford, a mill town in West Yorkshire, England, in 1937. While at art school in London, he bleached his hair, donned round black glasses and began wearing colorful, flamboyant suits.
“He’s instantly recognizable,” John Kasmin, an art dealer who gave Hockney his first solo show in 1963, tells Vogue’s Dodie Kazanjian. “He’s the only person I know who can wear yellow Crocs to Westminster Abbey.”
Hockney decamped to Los Angeles after that first show, and it was in the flat sunlight of California that he created iconic paintings like A Bigger Splash (1967) and Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972) that came to define his visual style.
Both paintings, on view at the retrospective, depict chlorine-blue pools and the sharp edges of mid-century modern architecture. But over the years, Hockney became more interested in the natural world, rather than the human creations built atop it.
Consider A Bigger Grand Canyon (1998), a nearly 25-foot-long oil painting of the Grand Canyon spread out over 60 canvases. The viewer is confronted with no other humans—only nature’s expanse and Hockney’s vivid colors.As the exhibition title suggests, the main focus rests on Hockney’s 21st-century works. In the past 25 years, he has created art with his traditional materials—oil and acrylic paint, charcoal, ink, pencil—and experimented with new digital tools.
Beginning in 2009, Hockney began painting flowers and landscapes on his iPhone and progressed to the iPad when it was released the following year.
“The reason I was good on the iPhone was that I always had quite small sketchbooks in my pocket, so with it being small, it didn’t matter to me that much,” Hockney tells W magazine’s Arthur Lubow.
His experimentation was met with mixed reviews. “They can never hide their electronic origins, no matter how painterly they appear,” art critic Adrian Searle wrote in the Guardian in 2012. “There’s something inescapably dead and bland and gutless about them.”
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But Hockney has never tried to hide his art or his methods, as the show at the Louis Vuitton Foundation shows. For an artist so focused on the future, criticism doesn’t slow him down.
“There are people in the art world who think he’s not very good … same as Picasso,” says Rosenthal to the Times. “But time will tell.”
In recent years, Hockney has continued to lean into experimental methods. In 2023, he helped create his own immersive experience, which included projections of his paintings across empty rooms. At the foundation, one gallery is filled with screens showing choreographed dancers in his studio.
“What I am trying to do is to bring people closer to something, because art is about sharing,” Hockney says in a statement. “You wouldn’t be an artist unless you wanted to share an experience, a thought.”
“David Hockney 25” is on view at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris through August 31, 2025.
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