During lockdown, the British artist painted every full moon of 2020 from his home in the Pays d'Auge region, iPad in hand and Maupassant on his mind. The Galerie Lelong in Paris brings together these fifteen nocturnal landscapes in an intimate and luminous exhibition.

Picture the scene. April 2020, France is at a standstill. David Hockney, however, is awake. In his Norman home in Rumesnil, in the heart of the Pays d'Auge, an unusual brightness rouses him from sleep. He gets up, goes to the window, and discovers a full moon of almost unreal size, suspended above the apple trees and meadows. The artist, who has just reread Clair de lune From Maupassant's short story, set in this very same rolling landscape of Calvados, he grabs his iPad and begins to draw. This nocturnal gesture, repeated month after month, will give rise to a cycle of fifteen works: a moon painted for each full moon of the year, from April 8 to December 5, 2020.

It is this collection, both modest in its dimensions and immense in what it reveals about an artist's relationship to time, light, and landscape, that the Galerie Lelong presents under the title The Moon Room. A title that the painter chose not to translate, attached as he is to its English euphony, and the gallery, which has represented him since 2001, had the good taste to follow him.

The fifteen iPad paintings, printed on paper in the artist's studio and then mounted on aluminum (a signed and numbered edition of fifteen), unfold in the space of the Tehran street like the pages of a personal diary. From one painting to the next, the moon changes size, position, and color. The framing also evolves: for seven months, Hockney painted from his window, through the domestic filter of curtains and wooden frames. Then, on the night of October 31, Halloween night, a pivotal night, he went outside. Five drawings, this time created from the garden, show the facade of the house with its lit windows and the moon crossing the sky between evening and morning. The point of view has been reversed: it is no longer the man looking at the landscape through the window, but the landscape looking at the man in his home. The last work in the series, tinged with joyful melancholy, adds Christmas garlands and an illuminated tree to the decor, the year closes in on itself.

Hockney's appetite for new tools is well known. From Polaroids in the 1980s to photocopies, from fax machines to the iPhone, the artist, born in Bradford in 1937, has constantly repurposed technologies, transforming them into instruments of vision. The iPad, adopted in 2010, has become one of his preferred mediums over the decade, an endless sketchbook, free from the constraints of drying time, thickness, and daylight. But in The Moon RoomThe tablet is no longer a simple tool: it is the very condition of the work. Only a backlit screen made it possible to paint in the almost total darkness of a night in the Norman countryside, without a lamp, without an easel, with nothing but the moon as a model and the memory of the eyes as a guide.

There is something profoundly Maupassantian about this series. Not the cruel pessimism of his tales, but this keen attention to natural phenomena, this ability to detect a sudden strangeness in a familiar landscape. Abbé Marignan, a character in Clair de lune, is seized by a mystical disturbance before the beauty of a summer night. Hockney, at eighty-two years old, is seized by a disturbance of another nature, that of the painter who, after sixty years of career, still discovers a new motif in the oldest spectacle in the world.

This collection was first shown at the Rouen Museum of Fine Arts in 2024, then included in the vast retrospective at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in 2025, the largest exhibition ever devoted to the artist, with more than four hundred works. Seeing it today in the intimate setting of the Galerie Lelong, far removed from the monumental scenography of Frank Gehry's building, offers a radically different experience. Here, intimacy reigns. We are in Hockney's bedroom, we share his insomnia, we gaze at the moon with him.

The Parisian exhibition also echoes the London spring program: the Serpentine North Gallery has been hosting it since March 12th. A Year in NormandyThe ninety-one-meter frieze, inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry, is accompanied by recent paintings. Two sides of the same fascination with Normandy, one diurnal and panoramic, the other nocturnal and contemplative.

At eighty-eight years old, Hockney still paints six hours a day. The Moon Room The most delicate proof of this is that sometimes all it takes is a window, a screen and a little patience to grasp what the night offers to those who are willing to look at it.

David Hockney – The Moon Room
Galerie Lelong
13 rue de Téhéran 75008 Paris
Until 7 May 2026

https://www.galerie-lelong.com/en

See this post on Instagram

A post shared by Galerie Lelong (@galerielelongparis)