David Hockney’s Astonishing Gaze: What Happens When You Really Look

Might you know the feeling, that flicker, as time slows down, just a touch? Not dramatically, not for long. Just enough to hold your breath for a moment. A leaf trembles before falling. Light spills across a kitchen counter and catches the rim of a teacup in such a way it feels, briefly, like a small revelation. The sun dips low and stretches the sky into a quiet blush, and there’s no one around to see it but you. So you pause. You look harder, want to hold it; the feeling, the view, the instant. You wish you could sketch it, freeze it, tuck it away somewhere under what made today feel real. Read more in David Hockney’s Astonishing Gaze: What Happens When You Really Look

Image on the left-hand side: David Hockney
“After Blake: Less is Known that People Think” 2024 Acrylic on canvas 72 x 48″ © David Hockney Photo Credit: Jonathan Wilkinson

Most of the time, those fleeting pulses, the hush before a leaf falls, the way light kisses a windowsill, pass us by. Life hurries. Eyes skim. But for some, those moments are quiet invitations: to stop, to notice, to see. In a world wired for speed and noise, the act of truly looking becomes something almost radical.

Not just looking, but really seeing, that’s the difference. A glance brushes the surface; a gaze lingers, listens, leans in. It says, without needing to be heard: I was here. This is what I saw. And maybe that’s the heart of it; holding space for beauty, even in chaos. Because no matter what, no matter the noise, the headlines, or the heartache, they can’t cancel the Spring.

David Hockney “Winter Timber” 2009 Oil on 15 canvases (36 x 48″ each)
274.32 x 609.6 cm (108 x 240 Inches)
© David Hockney Photo Credit: Jonathan Wilkinson

And this is what David Hockney has been doing for seven decades: Making the act of seeing into a devotion, a compulsion, a practice. At the Fondation Louis Vuitton (art space) this spring, ‘David Hockney, 25’ invites us to enter that practice with him. Across eleven rooms, with over 400 works in every conceivable medium, find pencil, ink, oil, charcoal, iPhone, iPad, video. This retrospective is less a summary than a journal, a visual diary that spans seventy years of observation, exploration, and relentless curiosity.

The exhibition opens not with the present but with a step back; into the 1950s, in Bradford, UK, where a young Hockney painted ‘Portrait of My Father’ (1955). Already there is a sense of intimacy, of proximity; a boy reaching toward something ordinary, and in the process, making it matter. From there, the show traces his early career through London and California, where light and swimming pools became his muses.

David Hockney “Portrait of My Father” 1955
Oil on canvas 50.8 x 40.6 cm (20 x 16 Inches) © David Hockney
Photo Credit: Richard Schmidt The David Hockney Foundation

Works you might recognise, like ‘A Bigger Splash’ (1967) and ‘Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)’ (1972) are not simply images of water or weather, but ways of thinking about surface, reflection, pleasure, even longing. Hockney doesn’t just paint people; he captures the air around them, the pause in their bodies, the stories beneath their clothes.

David Hockney “A Bigger Splash” 1967 Acrylic on canvas 242.5 x 243.9 x 3 cm (96 x 96 x 1.181 Inches) © David Hockney Tate, U.K.

You probably have watched two people in a room and felt the air between them speak louder than words? Throughout the 1970s, Hockney’s double portraits, most notably Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy (1970–71) and Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy (1968), reflect an evolving interest in human presence, the spaces between people, and the dialogue of glances. They are compositions of emotion as much as geometry.

David Hockney “Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy” 1968 Acrylic on canvas 212.09 x 303.53 cm (83.5 x 119.5 Inches)
© David Hockney Photo Credit: Fabrice Gibert

There’s a feeling that comes when you stand before something expansive; too wide, too wild to be held in one glance. By the 1980s and 90s, Hockney’s gaze turns to land; nature not as postcard but as lived terrain. ‘A Bigger Grand Canyon’ (1998) is not one view but many, stitched together in vibrant planes of colour, almost Cubist in their multiplicity. Hockney, ever suspicious of a single frame, seeks instead the layered complexity of experience.

‘A Bigger Grand Canyon’, 1998 – David Hockney

But it is in the past 25 years, the focus of the Fondation’s exhibition, that Hockney’s gaze has become even more experimental, even more intimate. Settling into the landscapes of Yorkshire, Normandy, and later London, he became almost monk-like in his dedication to daily looking. He paints the same roads, trees, fields, and skies; again and again. Shifting light and weather, in bloom and in barrenness. 

David Hockney “May Blossom on the Roman Road” 2009 Oil on 8 canvases (36 x 48″ each)182.88 x 487.7 x 0 cm (72 x 192 x 0 Inches) © David Hockney Photo Credit: Richard Schmidt

‘May Blossom on the Roman Road’ (2009) captures spring not as a season, but as an eruption. It is a celebration of pink and white and green. It’s painted with the vigour of someone who has not only noticed the world waking up but has waited patiently for it to do so.

This attentiveness culminates in ‘Bigger Trees near Warter’ (2007), a panoramic winter landscape so monumental it feels like stepping into a memory. It is both specific and mythic, a rural England both deeply personal and oddly universal. Nearby, in Gallery 4, Hockney’s portraits, some sixty in number, continue this exploration of presence.

David Hockney “Bigger Trees near Warter or/ou Peinture sur le Motif pour le Nouvel Age Post-Photographique” 2007 Oil on 50 canvases (36 x 48″ each) 457.2 x 1219.2 cm (180 x 480 Inches)© David Hockney Photo Credit: Prudence Cuming Associates Tate, U.K

Painted in acrylics and on iPad, they range from friends to family, each held in that same quiet gaze. His ‘portraits of flowers’, created on tablet but displayed in classic frames, blur the line between digital and traditional, ephemeral and permanent. ’25th June 2022, Looking at the Flowers (Framed)’ is a standout, radiating both warmth and something near grief. Hockney’s flowers are not background props but sitters in their own right, alive, defiant, delicate.

The exhibition’s next level is dedicated to Normandy, France, a place Hockney describes with reverence. In ‘220 for 2020’, a series of iPad works created over one year, he paints every day like a ritual. There is a rhythm to them: buds, blooms, decay. The sky in Gallery 6 takes on a new language, bold brushstrokes that seem to speak to Van Gogh in a shared vocabulary of turbulence and joy.

David Hockney “27th March 2020, No. 1” iPad painting printed on paper, mounted on 5 panels Exhibition Proof 2 364.09 x 521.4 cm (143.343 x 205.276 Inches) © David Hockney

Gallery 7 shifts again, this time to ink, ‘La Grande Cour’ (2019), a 24-part drawing that echoes the Bayeux Tapestry in both scale and storytelling, offers another kind of visual “check-in”, one rooted in history, myth, and repetition.

On the top floor, Hockney lets us into his library of influences. ‘The Great Wall’ (2000), a vast collection of reproductions from the Quattrocento ( art and culture 15th century in Italy) to the present day, charting the evolution of looking, from Fra Angelico to Cézanne, Lorrain to Picasso. These references aren’t academic footnotes but companions.

Hockney enters into conversation with them, borrows from them, dances with them. That dance becomes literal in Gallery 10, where his long-time love of opera comes alive in a new immersive installation. Set designs, music, and movement all swirl together in a polyphonic tribute to art as performance.

David Hockney “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” 1972
Acrylic on canvas 213.36 x 304.8 cm (84 x 120 Inches) © David Hockney Photo Credit: Art Gallery of New South Wales / Jenni Carter

The final room is quiet again. London, 2023 onward. Here, we meet Hockney most recently, and perhaps most mysteriously. Inspired by Edvard Munch(painter) and William Blake (poet), these works are dreamier, more cryptic. ‘After Munch: Less is Known than People Think’ (2023) and ‘After Blake: Less is Known than People Think’ (2024) merge time, space, and spirituality.

David Hockney “After Munch: Less is Known that People Think” 2023
Acrylic on canvas 48 x 72″ © David Hockney Photo Credit: Jonathan Wilkinson

Astronomy meets geography meets memory. It is Hockney looking not outward but inward, still checking in, but now with his own mythology. His latest self-portrait hangs here too, a final moment of presence, of seeing, of being seen.

‘It’s the NOW that is ETERNAL’

David Hockney

This extraordinary exhibition, ‘David Hockney, 25’, is not merely a retrospective but a living archive of attention. Curated with intimacy and precision by Suzanne Pagé (Artistic Director of Fondation Louis Vuitton), Sir Norman Rosenthal, (British curator and art historian), François Michaud, and the Hockney studio team. Yet the show has been shaped by Hockney himself at every turn.

Alongside longtime collaborators Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima and Jonathan Wilkinson, Hockney has designed each room as a continuation of his gaze; a series of perspectives, unfolding in sequence as though each viewer is taking a walk through his memories.

And what a place to take that walk. The Fondation Louis Vuitton, with its soaring Frank Gehry architecture, lends a kind of reverence to the exhibition; glass and light embracing colour and texture. Its eleven galleries feel like chapters in a book you didn’t know you needed to read. And when you finish, you don’t feel like you’ve just seen an artist’s work, you feel like you’ve been invited into a life. One shaped by daily looking, by seasonal shifts, by the gentle determination to bear witness to the world.

For those wanting to carry the exhibition home, or perhaps to linger a little longer inside Hockney’s world, ‘David Hockney’, published by Thames & Hudson in association with Fondation Louis Vuitton, offers a richly detailed companion to the show. More than a catalogue, it reads like a visual biography, spanning seventy years of relentless observation and experimentation. Curated with the artist’s own input and featuring over 400 works, from familiar icons to never-before-seen pieces like ‘After Blake: Less is Known than People Think’ (2024), the book mirrors the sweep of the exhibition itself. 

Voices such as Norman Rosenthal, Suzanne Pagé, Simon Schama, and Fiona Maddocks guide the reader through Hockney’s life, not only chronologically but thematically; from pools to portraits, opera sets to iPad sketches. Printed on a generous scale, with gatefolds that allow his landscapes to breathe, this is a book that invites not just looking, but the kind of deep, slow seeing Hockney has always championed. 

‘Do remember they can’t cancel the Spring’

David Hockney

Indeed, they can’t. Not as long as someone is paying attention, not as long as there’s a quiet observer ready to pause, to look, and to notice. Not as long as there are eyes willing to search for the hidden pulse in everyday moments, the subtle shifts in light, the overlooked beauty in the ordinary. Because while the world changes, while things fall away, there will always be something waiting to be noticed, something waiting to bloom. And as long as someone is there to see it, it can never truly be gone.

DAVID HOCKNEY 25 – Exhibition “Do remember, they can’t cancel the spring” From April 9 to August 31st 2025 8 Avenue du Mahatma Gandhi, Bois de Boulogne, Paris Book your visit on Fondationlouisvuitton.fr

David Hockney – Photobook, edited by Norman Rosenthal Published by Thames & Hudson and Fondation Louis Vuitton Available in UK, Europe, Rest of World: 9 April 2025 US & Canada: June 3, 2025. Get the book on Fnac.com

If you enjoyed reading David Hockney’s Astonishing Gaze: What Happens When You Really Look, then why not try Arte Povera: Two Sides of the Same Artistic Canvas

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