David Hockney 25
iPad export tooling for David Hockney's largest ever exhibition
Client: David Hockney and Studio
Looking for the app? It was made for one artist and isn't for sale - but tell us if you'd want it.
Venue: Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris
Exhibition dates: 9 April 2025 to 1 September 2025
In short
David Hockney 25 was the largest show of his career, and much of it was iPad work shown at a size no exhibition had tried before. Our part was getting those paintings off the iPad at that size - prints, replay films and the Moon Room - without losing a mark.
Installation view, David Hockney 25, Fondation Louis Vuitton. © David Hockney. Video filmed by Jonathan Wilkinson.
The show
Over 400 works across eleven galleries, from the 1950s to pictures finished weeks before it opened. The whole of the first floor - Galleries 5 to 7 - was given to the Normandy iPad paintings of 2020, with the 220 for 2020 series in Gallery 5 in a newly conceived installation: day after day, season after season, the light changing over the same few fields. Elsewhere, a near-dark room held the Moon paintings.
What the studio needed
Exports further than any show had asked for: the Normandy paintings printed for large-format presentation across several floors; replay films of the paintings being made, cut to the Fondation's production pipeline; and the Moon Room outputs, at whatever size and format the room required.
The Moon paintings were the delicate ones. Hockney made them outdoors at night because the iPad is backlit - "with my backlit iPad, I could draw it," he said; "this would have been virtually impossible without it" - and they live in deep blacks and small shifts of luminosity. Shown in a darkened room, every one of those shifts had to survive the export: tone, contrast, the edges of the marks.
What it took
We extended the export side of Hockney Brushes, the app we built for him in 2018 and still look after for his studio - the painting side stayed exactly as he used it. Because the app stores every stroke rather than pixels, a painting can be drawn again at any size, and the work here was making that consistent and predictable at the Fondation's scale: the same file yielding a print, a film and a room, each fitting the pipeline that would show it. Hockney's verdict, reported by BBC News, was that he was "amazed they could be blown up so big" from something so small.
Moon Room installation, David Hockney 25, Fondation Louis Vuitton. © David Hockney. Video filmed by Jonathan Wilkinson.
Press
"David Hockney 25 is a rousing, dopamine-unleashing celebration and summation of a brilliant, beloved artist's work."
– The Telegraph ★★★★★
"As you let his intense blues cascade over you to the strains of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, you realise how deep and sustaining a love for life this man feels and can communicate. By this time I had tears in my eyes."
– The Guardian ★★★★★
"Many of these artworks were created on his iPad. Viewers see his strokes and gestures, the pitter patter of his fingers. You can almost discern Hockney's fingerprints. The impact of seeing his technique laid so visible is that viewers have an immediate sense of the artist's touch."
– Mastermind Paris
"I'm just laughing, I mean we made it!"
– David Hockney on seeing the completed exhibition, BBC News
Exhibition details: Fondation Louis Vuitton – David Hockney 25. The Moon paintings went on to Galerie Lelong, Paris, Pace, New York and Gray, Chicago in 2026.
Artwork rights: David Hockney artworks shown for documentation of Reflex Arc’s project history only, © David Hockney / the David Hockney Foundation. No licensing available via Reflex Arc.
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Interested in the app?
Hockney Brushes was built for one artist, to his specifications, and it isn't for sale. A lot of people arrive here looking for it, and we'd like to know how many. If it were ever released - the app itself, with the studio's agreement, or something of our own built on what we learned - would you want to hear about it? Leave your email and, if you like, a line about what you'd use it for. We'll use it for nothing else.
The full story of the app, and everywhere the work made with it has been shown: The iPad painting app we built for David Hockney.
