David Hockney, Life in Full Color
The Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris hosts the largest retrospective devoted to David Hockney, one of the most innovative and life-affirming artists of our time. With more than 400 works, the exhibition celebrates his luminous gaze and his inexhaustible curiosity about color, technology and life. Hockney, at almost 88, continues to explore art with freedom, humor and sensitivity, proving that spring – like art – cannot be cancelled.
There is an unmissable appointment in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris for all lovers of art. Frank Gehry’s imposing Fondation Louis Vuitton building, with its wings of translucent glass spread to the wind, houses until 1 September the largest exhibition ever devoted to the artist David Hockney (Bradford, 1937): “David Hockney, 25 – Do remember they can’t cancel the spring”. This phrase, as the exhibition’s curator Suzanne Page declared, was a message Hockney sent with a bunch of daffodils to his friends during the pandemic. It was a message of hope. This phrase, in neon letters, gives us a warm welcome on the facade of the Fondation, at the artist’s express wish.
Play Within a Play Within a Play and Me with a Cigarette, 2025. Acrylic on canvas with collage.
This anthological exhibition features more than 400 works distributed across the building’s eleven rooms. The exhibition, of unprecedented scale, covers the last 25 years of the British artist’s creative work. But works as iconic as A Bigger Splash (1967), Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972) or Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy (1970-1971), among others, can be seen on the museum’s ground floor.
It is from the 1980s and 1990s onward that nature becomes a powerful source of inspiration for Hockney. With a very personal vision and style, his vibrant landscapes are a highly original reinterpretation of nature. Moments of his closest reality are captured and distilled into undulating, dynamic fields, with bright colors and fantasy filtered through his sensibility and made eternal. His skill in the use of color, light and perspective is pure visual energy, pure emotion. That skill with color is intensified by his synesthesia, through which the stimulus of musical melodies produces in him visual sensations of color.
Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), 1972. Acrylic on canvas.
In the year 2000, which is the start of the body of works in this show, is the year in which David Hockney begins to develop a study of the optical devices used by the great masters of Western art, such as Van Eyck, Caravaggio or Vermeer. His theory concerns how the artists achieved realistic effects thanks to these tools. Helped by the physicist Charles Falco, he investigated errors in old paintings caused by the use of optical lenses. This theory was the cover of the Observer for the great interest and controversy it generated.
Winter Timber, 2009. Oil on fifteen canvases.
David Hockney is one of the most significant and influential British artists of our time. His work reveals a life-affirming and charismatic personality. Disciplined in his work and multifaceted, his curiosity serves as the engine to experiment with all kinds of artistic techniques. Without leaving aside new advances, this artist of almost 88 has always been at the avant-garde, experimenting with new formats and technologies as modern tools of a prolific creativity, such as his digital works created with the iPad, photography or video installations. Free and authentic, he was one of the artists of the counterculture, openly showing his homosexuality through his drawings and paintings in the 1960s, in an England that partially decriminalized it in 1967, and which still had a long way to go for it to be complete. Sociable and with a great sense of British humor, elegant and provocative, cultured and lucid, this tireless and insatiable artist has produced a fertile and dazzling career, celebrating life every day.
– David Hockney, Life in Full Color – – Alejandra de Argos –
