Viewing A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting

A free David Hockney exhibition opens at Serpentine North Gallery this week, the artist’s first exhibition at the galleries. Titled A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting, presents new and recent work by one of Britain’s most influential contemporary artists.

The show’s spectacular centrepiece is a monumental digital frieze A Year in Normandie (2020–21), a ninety-metre-long landscape created on an iPad while the artist was living in rural France during the Covid-19 pandemic. Inspired by the narrative sweep of the medieval Bayeux Tapestry, the work records the changing seasons in the garden surrounding Hockney’s Normandy studio, unfolding as a continuous panorama of trees, blossoms, and shifting light. Displayed for the first time in London, the frieze invites viewers to walk alongside it, experiencing time as a visual journey through the year. The exhibition also includes a series of new still lifes and portraits depicting members of Hockney’s close circle, unified by a simple gingham tablecloth motif and a direct, frontal composition.

Together, these works reflect Hockney’s long-standing fascination with perception and the act of looking. Even at eighty-eight, he continues to experiment with technology and format, using digital tools to capture everyday beauty. Set within the surroundings of Kensington Gardens, the exhibition encourages visitors to slow down and observe the rhythms of nature—an idea that has remained central to Hockney’s practice for more than six decades.