'A mutual love affair' David Hockney retrospective is ready to make a big splash in Paris

David Hockney retrospective is ready to make a big splash in Paris

- Philip Oltermann

Opening its doors this coming Wednesday, Paris's biggest art show of the year carries the humble title David Hockney 25. A more accurate description of its ambition would have been the name of Hockney's best-known painting: A Bigger Splash.

Purportedly focused on the last 25 years of the Yorkshire-born painter's career, the 456 works on display at all of the Fondation Louis Vuitton's 11 vast galleries in fact span the years 1955 to 2025. The one-off exhibition includes acrylic paintings, iPad drawings and immersive video works, from Hockney's classic Californian swimming pool scenes via swinging 60s portraits to the pastoral Yorkshire and Normandy landscapes of the later years, as well as unseen, Blake-inspired spiritual paintings completed in the past two years.

Announced by its British curator Norman Rosenthal as "the most important show" in the career of Britain's greatest living artist, and described by the architect Frank Gehry as "the biggest show they've ever had" at the decade-old private museum, it also underscores the French capital's attempt to reclaim its status as Europe's art capital from London.