David Hockney: A Life in Pop Art

David Hockney's new exhibition in Paris is entitled David Hockney, 25. Not a reference to the artist's age – he will be 88 this year – but the focus he has put on the most recent 25 years of his work. Because he is still creating and still innovating, from iPad paintings to monumental landscapes of Yorkshire and Normandy as well as an immersive plunge into the world of opera.

Although the exhibition has examples of work from his whole career since 1955 amongst the 400 works, the effervescent Hockney wanted the main focus to be on his most recent work.

Hockney was born in Bradford, Yorkshire, in 1937. He studied at the Bradford College of Art and the Royal College of Art, London before spending several decades in California, where he gained a reputation as part of the pop art movement for his bright colours and flat perspective.

Since returning to live in Yorkshire in 2004 and spending extended periods in Normandy, Hockney has continued the monumental landscape paintings he began in California.

He has embraced modern technology, often painting on his iPad images which are then reproduced on canvas, such as these Normandy landscapes he made during lockdown:

(Self-)portraits
Another theme David Hockney has long explored is portraiture and self-portraiture, as can be seen in the image at the top of the page and the trailer for the exhibition. There's a good teaching resource on Hockney and portraiture from the National Portrait Gallery in London. For language teaching, pupils could be asked to do a "pen portrait", a written description of a portrait they would like to paint or photograph, or one of Hockney's works in the resource. They could also describe a portrait to a classmate who can't see it, and who has to try to reproduce it as faithfully as possible. Or write a prompt for an AI program describing one of the Hockney portraits and see how accurate the result is.

In recent years, Hockney has revisited sets he designed for operas by Stravinsky, Satie, Poulenc, Wagner, Mozart and Puccini in the 1970s and 1980s, producing an immersive installation in the largest room of this exhibition.

David Hockney, 25
Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris
9 April-31 August 2025