David Hockney retrospective fills Paris Fondation Vuitton

PARIS: The largest exhibition yet of works by British artist David Hockney opened in Paris on Tuesday, filling the entire multi-storey Fondation Louis Vuitton museum with more than 400 works spanning seven decades.

Drawn from museums and private collections worldwide, the ‘David Hockney 25’ exhibition focuses on the last quarter century of Hockney’s work, including many of the digital paintings on iPad he has pioneered.

Co-curated by Hockney’s friend Norman Rosenthal, it also features some of Hockney’s best-known works, including the 1972 ‘Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)’, which in 2018 sold for $90 million, at the time the highest price for a work by a living artist.

“I’ve learned to compare David 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,” Rosenthal said.

Many of the works are set in London and in Yorkshire and Normandy, respectively northern England and northern France, where the artist has spent most of his time this century.

“The show means an enormous amount to me because it is the largest I ever had … in the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s great Parisian building, designed by my LA friend Frank Gehry,” said Hockney in the exhibition brochure, referring to the winged building in Paris’ Bois de Boulogne park.

The exhibition includes the monumental 12 metre-wide “Bigger Trees Near Warter”, painted in 2007, paintings from his California period in the 1970s, as well as dozens of still lifes, landscapes, portraits and self-portraits.

One of the most influential artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, Hockney, 87, was a major figure of the Pop Art movement of the 1960s and has remained at the forefront of modern art, reinventing his familiar themes in new media and technologies, the exhibition’s brochure said.

“(Hockney) shows us the way, while recognising that the path that he himself has followed is continually evolving,” Fondation Louis Vuitton President Bernard Arnault wrote in an introduction to the exhibition.

It runs until August 31.