From April 9 through August 31, 2025, the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris hosted David Hockney 25, an expansive exhibition celebrating twenty-five of the painter's recent Normandy landscapes alongside monumental multi-canvas works and digital iPad suites. At eighty-seven years old, Hockney demonstrated a level of relentless technical curiosity that continues to unsettle younger generations of artists.
Having relocated to a traditional timber-framed farmhouse in rural Normandy in 2019, Hockney dedicated himself to recording the cyclic transformation of seasons across his orchard. Utilizing an iPad customized with specialized stylus software, he produced hundreds of rapid drawings capturing morning mists, budding apple trees, and shifting skies before translating select compositions onto monumental multi-panel oil canvases.
What distinguishes Hockney’s late digital work is his refusal to treat electronic tablets as devices of synthetic illusion. Unlike generative AI systems that hallucinate composite images from pre-existing statistical databases, Hockney uses the digital glass screen purely as an empirical drawing pad. Every mark remains indexically tied to his optical observation: his wrist, his eye, and the actual light reflecting off wet grass in northern France.
This exhibition reaffirmed Hockney’s lifelong conviction that single-point photographic perspective represents an inadequate, tyrannical reduction of human perception. By joining multiple viewpoints into sprawling, panoramic compositions, his Normandy canvases invite the viewer to wander across the surface—mirroring how our eyes continually dart, refocus, and assemble physical space over duration.
In a contemporary art landscape obsessed with algorithmic disembodiment and cynical conceptual strategies, Hockney’s Normandy work stands as a defiant affirmation of visual joy. At eighty-seven, his currency rests not on novelty, but on an obstinate ethical commitment to look at the living world with unhurried, patient intensity.
Sources: Fondation Louis Vuitton official catalog (April 2025); Le Figaro (April 10, 2025); The Guardian (April 12, 2025).