With the stirrings of spring evident everywhere, it feels like the perfect moment to open an exhibition in which the UK’s best-loved artist celebrates the changing of the seasons in a gallery set within one of London’s most beautiful parks. All works will be new to British gallery goers, with some so recently completed it looks like the paint’s barely dry. And, I almost forgot to mention, admission to this David Hockney show is free.
Hung along the corridor surrounding the Serpentine’s North gallery, A Year in Normandie is Hockney’s largest work to date: a 90-metre frieze chronicling the changes in light and colour around his studio in northern France, from winter to winter in the Covid year of 2020-21. If I was initially disappointed to learn that the 200-odd panels are iPad paintings rather than works on canvas, they’re so expertly lit that it’s hard to believe they’re simply print-outs pinned to the wall. The work glows like some endless lightbox circuiting the building, the images segued with a smoothness that could never be achieved with traditional painting. There’s an exhilarating sense of a continuous view around Hockney’s garden, as though we’re walking through time as well as space.
Hockney’s initial inspiration came from the endlessly unfolding Bayeux Tapestry, which he’s loved since childhood. His finished work, however, incorporates many visual styles and ways of looking at the world, interwoven and juxtaposed with Hockney’s instinctive flair. (It is by pure coincidence that the Bayeux Tapestry will be showing at the British Museum for much of this show’s run; Hockney himself strongly objected to the move, for conservation reasons, in an article in this newspaper.)
In the early stages – as snow, evoked in dead-straight lines of green on white, gives way to the buds of spring – Hockney abandons Western fixed-point perspective in favour of Chinese “aerial” perspective, as seen in the ancient scroll paintings he greatly admires. It feels as though we’re looking across the rolling sward around his Normandy farmhouse from several viewpoints simultaneously. The fact that the blossoms glowing against the turquoise sky look more than a little Japanese, with a nod to Vincent van Gogh, is entirely the point.
Around halfway, just past the emergency exit, there’s a sudden burst of rain, indicated in simple downward lines – another Japanese touch – before the landscape takes on a more measured, traditionally European character. Imagine Constable country dotted with psychedelic magenta trees. With the faintest softening and yellowing of colour, Hockney carries us into high summer, before we find ourselves on the terrace at the back of his house with a chilly-looking stream flowing past. Those blossoming trees are now heavy with fruit, and snow’s already visible some 30 feet away along the endless glowing wall.
open image in gallery
A detail shot of ‘A Year in Normandie’ by David Hockney (David Hockney/Serpentine Gallery)
This work’s first showing was at Paris’s Orangerie, which also houses Claude Monet’s panoramic water-lily paintings – that other great essay in nature, space and time – the parallels with which Hockney was only too aware. His ways of evoking the textures of nature, achieved using the tools on the iPad’s Brushes app, are endlessly inventive: criss-crossing and overlaying streams of dots and leaves created with a single sweep of his stylus; hand-drawn lines and startling contrasts in colour evoking shifts in light and temperature. Hockney’s method often feels like a kind of digital Impressionism.
The gallery’s two central rooms are taken up with oil paintings completed at the end of last year under the title “Some Other Thoughts about Painting”. Each of the 10 canvases centres on a table with a chequered tablecloth seen in reverse perspective, becoming narrower as it extends towards us. If that’s the opposite of what we expect, Hockney regards it as truer to the way we actually see the world.
open image in gallery
‘Thomas Mupfupi Resting on a Pink and White Checkered Tablecloth’ by David Hockney (2025) (David Hockney/Serpentine Gallery)
In five of these new works, paintings stand on the table, including a Rothko and one of Gerhard Richter’s smeared abstracts, against wallpaper that could pass for another abstract painting. We’re back on the theme of “painting within a painting” that Hockney has been exploring since his student days. In the other five works, people close to Hockney sit in front of paintings: Joe Hage appears before Bruegel’s Tower of Babel, which entirely fills the background, while Thomas Mupfupi (one of his team of round-the-clock carers) and Jack Ransome are seen in front of two of Hockney’s Yorkshire landscape paintings. Or are they the actual landscapes?
Entertaining as these works are, I keep coming back to that ever-changing, encircling view through the passage of the seasons. Hockney is apparently in frail health, and is often talked of as though each new work could be his last. You get absolutely no sense of that from this exhibition. Its immersive evocation of the renewal not only of nature, but of art and life itself, couldn’t have arrived at a better moment. It offers a message of hope to a desperate world.
‘A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting’ is at the Serpentine Gallery from 12 March until 23 August