Paris exhibition brings more than 400 vibrant artworks by David Hockney

PARIS: Increasingly frail but with undimmed passion, Britain's David Hockney has put aside his health worries to shape what he describes as the biggest exhibition of his vast career.

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With around 400 works assembled over four floors, the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris has put on a stunning tribute to one of the world's best-selling living artists. Although titled "David Hockney, 25" and mostly focused on the last quarter-century of his life, it contains paintings from the very start of his career, as well as his blockbuster time in California in the 1960s. In the last of Il rooms, there are several unseen creations from the last two years, including a self-portrait in acrylic and a striking meditation on the afterlife inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy.

"It's enabled him to look back in a positive way," Norman Rosenthal, guest curator and a long-time friend of Hockney, said AFP ahead of the opening to the public. "He's very, very happy with the exhibition." Hockney, 87, insisted on overseeing the show, even taking an interest in the colour of the walls and sending back corrections for the texts written to inform visitors. "He says it is the biggest exhibition of his career," Louis Vuitton Foundation curator Suzanne Page said. "He's been very involved."

Born in 1937 to working-class parents in the northern English town of Bradford, Hockney has painted everything from the fields of his native Yorkshire to the sun-soaked private homes of California. The Paris show includes an entire room of portraits, as well as vivid landscapes and memorable moonlight scenes that he produced while living in Normandy, northern France, from 2019 to 2023.