iPad export tooling for the David Hockney's largest ever exhibition

Client: David Hockney and Studio

Venue: Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris

Exhibition dates: 9 April 2025 to 1 September 2025

David Hockney 25 was the largest exhibition of Hockney's career to date: over 400 works across 11 galleries at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. A significant portion of the show featured iPad paintings – including the celebrated Normandy series – presented at extraordinary scale.

We made that possible by extending the bespoke iPad tooling we maintain for the artist and his studio.

Since 2018, we've developed and maintained David Hockney's custom iPad painting app – a private, bespoke tool built to his specifications for use by the artist and his studio. The app is built natively for iOS using Apple's Metal framework for GPU-accelerated rendering. For this exhibition, the studio needed to push exports further than ever before: ultra-high-resolution images, animated playback videos, and room-scale outputs for one of the most ambitious presentations of his iPad work to date.

Installation view, David Hockney 25, Fondation Louis Vuitton. © David Hockney. Video filmed by Jonathan Wilkinson.

The challenge

An iPad painting starts small – intimate, handheld. Exhibition production needs the opposite: outputs that are extremely high resolution, reliable and repeatable.

For David Hockney 25, the scale pushed further than any previous show, with iPad-originated works presented across multiple floors of the Fondation. The key challenges were reliability, fidelity and practicality: exports had to retain the clarity of individual brush marks and colour transitions while fitting into production workflows.

What we did

We extended the bespoke iPad tooling we maintain for David Hockney and his studio, focusing on export workflows and studio usability. Our work supported three main categories of iPad-derived output:

• iPad paintings exported at ultra-high resolution for large-format presentation
• Animated playback videos generated from iPad works, suitable for exhibition pipelines
• Moon Room imagery and video outputs, prepared at the required scale and formats

The emphasis was on delivering outputs that were consistent, predictable and production-friendly – without disrupting the artist's established creative process.

The Normandy iPad works

A significant portion of the exhibition's first floor (Galleries 5 to 7) was dedicated to David Hockney's Normandy iPad paintings, created during 2020 while the artist was based in France. This body of work represents one of the most sustained and ambitious uses of the iPad in his career.

The 220 for 2020 series – completed entirely on iPad – was presented in Gallery 5 in a newly conceived installation. Day after day, season after season, Hockney captured shifts in light, colour and atmosphere across the Normandy landscape.

Despite originating on a handheld device, these works were presented at extraordinary scale. Even David himself remarked that he was "amazed they could be blown up so big."

Our role was to ensure those iPad paintings could leave the device cleanly and reliably, preserving the clarity of every mark as they moved into exhibition-scale production workflows.

The Moon paintings

One of the most striking spaces was a near-darkened room dedicated to Hockney's Moon paintings, also created on iPad. The backlit iPad made it possible for Hockney to work outdoors at night, capturing the deep blacks and subtle luminosity of the moonlit landscape – producing night-time images he has said would have been "virtually impossible" without it.

These works required particular care during export, ensuring tonal subtlety, contrast and edge detail were retained when presented in a low-light exhibition environment.

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 ★★★★★

"I'm just laughing, I mean we made it!"

– David Hockney on seeing the completed exhibition, BBC News

"Some of the iPad paintings are huge. He's amazed they could be blown up so big when they were created on something so small."

– BBC News

"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 was thrilled to walk into a 'moon room,' consisting mostly of iPad paintings, where the technology really allows Hockney to capture the luminosity of the night sky."

– Marcia Crumley Art

"Thanks to the screen's luminosity, Hockney was able to paint the night and capture its magic in the Moon Room."

– Dreamideamachine

"The moon room was a complete revelation."

– Tripadvisor visitor review

About our iPad app work for David Hockney

We've worked with David Hockney and his studio since 2018, building and maintaining his custom iPad painting app. It enables painting, ultra-high-resolution export, animated brush stroke playback, and augmented reality preview.

Our tools have supported major exhibitions including The Arrival of Spring at the Royal Academy (2021), A Year in Normandie (2021–22), and Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away) at Lightroom, London (2023).

This work sits alongside other GPU-accelerated projects we've delivered – from NVIDIA AI SDK plugin integrations for non-headset mixed-reality spectator cameras and effects at live events, to WebRTC video streaming from embedded Jetson devices. The common thread is production-grade output from demanding real-time systems.

For broader context on our ongoing work: David Hockney – iPad App Development.

Exhibition details: Fondation Louis Vuitton – David Hockney 25.