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Rounding the entrance to the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris’s 16th arrondissement, there is a string of neon pink text affixed to the building’s sail-like structure. “Do remember, they can’t cancel the spring,” it reads. The phrase, inscribed in the prolific British artist David Hockney’s signature scrawl, reads both as an injunction and a welcome balm in these uncertain times. It’s also a fitting prelude to the foundation’s spring presentation: a monumental, career-spanning survey of Hockney’s ever-elastic work, entitled “David Hockney 25.” The exhibition, which runs through August 31, 2025, is co-curated by the foundation’s director, Suzanne Pagé, and famed British curator, Sir Norman Rosenthal. Significantly, the artist himself was also closely involved in the organization and hanging of the show. On view are more than 400 works in a variety of media, including oil and acrylic painting, pencil and charcoal drawing, digital art, and immersive video installations, all made between 1955 and 2025.

Hockney has always avoided categorizing himself with specific styles or movements. Instead, he’s concerned more with capturing the subtle nuances of what he sees. While his practice is sometimes grouped with Pop art, he grew exhausted with the label in the 1960s and ’70s. Instead, he is propelled forward by his enthusiasm for his work, often made in “cycles” that respond to new circumstances or surroundings: He loves making things and always being in the studio. Even at 87 years old, and in spite of health issues stemming from his beloved cigarettes, the indefatigable artist has no intention of slowing down. Indeed, some works in the show were made so recently that they didn’t make the print deadline for the exhibition catalogue.

“David teaches us how to really see what’s in front of us: the leaves, the flowers in springtime, and the everyday things in life. Often we look, but we don’t really see,” Pagé told Artsy. “But I hope that people come away from this exhibition holding onto that miraculous feeling…to recognize the beauty in the mundane, which they carried within themselves all along. That is David’s gift that he’s given back to all of us.”

In celebration of his latest exhibition, Artsy has selected some of his most iconic works that are on view in the Paris show.

Portrait of My Father, 1955

Portrait of My Father (1955) is one of Hockney’s earliest known works, painted when he was 18 years old, and an example of the artist’s early promise in portraiture.

Hockney showed an interest in art from his childhood in Bradford, England, and he decided at the age of 11 that he wanted to be an artist. He was always engaging with his surroundings, and his talents were encouraged by his parents, who arranged for private lessons. At 16, he enrolled in the Bradford School of Art, a modest institution that emphasized traditional methods of drawing from observation and figurative work, which is where he discovered his love of painting. During this period, Hockney would push around a cart filled with painting materials all around Bradford, capturing the city in the shadows of World War II. Upon graduating, he realized that his training had emphasized only traditional styles of painting and drawing, and enrolled in the Royal College of Art in London in 1959 to be closer to a more modern style of making art.

This work was exhibited as a part of the “Yorkshire Arts Exhibition” at Leeds Art Gallery, and was the first work Hockney ever sold: an early milestone for an artist whose works now sell for tens of millions. His painting Portrait Of An Artist (Pool With Two Figures) (1972), sold at Christie’s New York in 2018 for $90.3 million (including fees): at the time, the most expensive work to ever sell at auction by a living artist.

A Bigger Splash, 1967

“When you think of California, of course there is Ed Ruscha and a number of American artists, but most people, when they think of California visually, they think of David Hockney,” Rosenthal told Artsy.

Following his university years during the “Swinging Sixties” in London, Hockney was seduced by the hedonistic promise of California, with its sense of rebellion and tolerance for homosexuality, which was still illegal in England at the time. He first moved to L.A. in early 1964, prompted by his embrace of his sexuality as well as his youthful interest in Hollywood films. Hockney would go on to stay there for almost four decades.

Hockney has an enduring fascination with Los Angeles’s swimming pools, palm trees, houses, sunshine, and people, portraying L.A. as an endless paradise that lives on in the mind’s eye. This flattened, luminous vision of Southern California is most notably immortalized in A Bigger Splash (1967). The piece represents a departure from Hockney’s previous work, which was more abstract in its expression and employed darker palettes. Painted from an advertisement for swimming pools Hockney came across in a magazine, the painting shows a pool with the splash of someone who has just jumped in.

As such, the painting seems to have no subject—a rarity for his paintings at the time. This anonymity invites intrigue, as viewers imagine who may have just dived in, or feel the rush of springing from a diving board themselves into cool water beneath the heat of the California sun. But it is the ephemeral moment, those split seconds in the aftermath of a subject puncturing the water’s surface, that most intrigued Hockney. Fascinated by the interplay between water and light, he has produced many works featuring swimming pools, rendering them each time in a different style, including in Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool (1966); Pool and Steps, Le Nid du Duc (1971); and Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972).

Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy, 1971

A key work from Hockney’s series of double portraits, Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy (1971) captures the artist’s friends, fashion designers Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell, shortly after their marriage. Said to have been a wedding present for the couple, the painting breaks from traditional marriage portraiture that typically sees the female seated: in this depiction, it is Birtwell who stands, while Clark lounges in the chair. The two subjects look directly at the viewer, inviting them into not only their bedroom where the painting is set, but also into their marriage. Percy, of course, is the cat, visible on Clark’s lap. The portrait also signals the brewing tension between them: The couple split not long after.

Birtwell has been a longtime muse for Hockney; she has appeared in nearly 30 of his portraits over the years, and each picture renders her in a different style. Capturing the same subject matter over and again is a hallmark of Hockney’s, and shows his interest in marking the passage of time.

Between 1968 and 1975, Hockney created seven landmark double paintings, including one of novelist Christopher Isherwood and artist Don Bachardy. At seven feet high, these paintings are nearly life-size. Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy (1971) was quickly heralded as one of Hockney’s early masterpieces, and shortly after its completion it was added to the collection of the Tate. The work marks a pivotal moment for Hockney upon his return to London after his California years. The work “is, in his own estimation, as close as he gets to naturalism,” reads the exhibition catalogue.

A Bigger Grand Canyon, 1998

In the summer of 1997, Hockney took a road trip through the American southwest and returned to the Grand Canyon, a subject that fascinated him for decades. He first photographed the natural wonder in 1982 with his Pentax 110 camera when he was exploring photographic collages. He loved using the camera as a medium and a drawing tool, capturing a subject at different angles and distances, in homage to the Cubists.

But following his pilgrimage to the Grand Canyon during that summer in the late ’90s, Hockney decided to paint it from memory upon his return to his studio in Los Angeles. This culminated in his masterpiece, A Bigger Grand Canyon (1998), that unfolds across 60 smaller canvases assembled together in a grid. “I’d just think about this space…it is about the only place on earth that really makes you look in every direction. You feel small. And the longer you look the more thrilling it becomes,” he said, in an exhibition catalogue for a show at L.A. Louver in 1998.

The work is a celebration of the epic scale of American landscape and employs a more pigmented, bold palette than he used in his previous works, a new style he developed in the mid to late ’90s as he spent time back in Yorkshire following the death of his dear friend, American sculptor Jonathan Silver.

Bigger Trees near Warter or/ou Peinture sur le Motif pour le Nouvel Age Post-Photographique, 2007

Bigger Trees near Warter or ou Peinture sur le Motif pour le Nouvel Age Post-Photographique (2007) is Hockney’s largest work to date, made upon his return to Yorkshire following the death of his mother. There’s a certain melancholy to the piece, with the trees barren of their leaves following a long winter. Nonetheless, a patch of daffodils peeks through, emblematic of the fleeting beauty of life.

The work is celebrated not only for its monumental scale—measuring over 40 feet wide and comprising 50 canvases—but also for its depth of detail that is typically attributed to historical, religious, mythological, or allegorical works like Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937), or Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830). Hockney’s masterpiece devotes that same meticulous care to the coming of spring. He constructed the painting from many different perspectives, beginning with drawings and paintings made en plein air, which he then scanned and assembled on the computer to capture the scale.

“I’d go and sit there for three hours at a time just looking up at the branches, lying down practically so I looked up,” Hockney once explained of the work, which was the fixture of the Royal Academy of London’s 2007 “Summer Exhibition,” where it spanned the length of the gallery’s walls. “It needed a hell of a lot of planning, but we did it rather quickly. The deadline wasn’t the “Summer Exhibition.” The deadline was the arrival of spring.”

27th March 2020, No. 1, 2020

The first wave of Covid lockdowns, which Hockney spent in Normandy, was a period of prolific output for the artist. 27th March 2020, No. 1 (2020) marked a new medium for the artist, which has become one of his trademarks: the iPad. He purchased his first iPad in 2010 and was instantly captivated by its ability to let him render scenes with an immediacy not found in traditional media. He could capture the shifting light, or make instant revisions, and would often send pictures off to family and friends via email upon their completion. Hockney has become a champion of the technology and often muses that should Van Gogh have had access to an iPad, he most certainly would have used it.

In those dark Covid times, this image provided joy and a moment of levity as it ricocheted around the internet. The work was later made into a print and mounted on aluminum. This process reinforces Hockney’s understanding of the tablet as a serious tool for image making, just as valid as paintbrushes, pencils, or crayons.

The subject of the work is one of Hockney’s favorites: the arrival of spring. “David is passionate about life, and one of the great things in life is the coming of spring,” noted Rosenthal. “He is fascinated by the spring, yes, but also by the winter, by night, by storms, by the moon; by everything that is in front of his eyes. He has found his own way of representing the randomness of existence and the randomness of nature; he’s very aware of death but above all he is also aware of life, and the preciousness of life and that nothing is ever the same.”