David Hockney: A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting at Serpentine North

From his gold lamé-suited Royal College of Art graduation to octogenarian present, David Hockney has long ploughed his own furrow, charting his career course as the tides of art world trends rise and fall. Deeply engaged with the act of looking, the legendary Bradford-born painter holds an enduring fascination for light and Mother Nature’s seasonal transitions. Back in 2018, a four-day road trip in Northern France so captivated Hockney that he made the decision to acquire an old farmhouse in the Normandy village of Beuvron-en-Auge. This rural idyll would be his home and chief artistic stimulus from 2019 until late 2023. In 2020, as COVID-19 lockdown came into force, the Englishman sought to capture in 200 iPad drawings, the changing appearance of his bucolic French residence and surrounding countryside over the course of the year. By the end of those 12 months, having shed 100 of the images, Hockney created his frieze, A Year in Normandie (2020-21). Now, the 90-metre-long work goes on display for the first time in the land of the artist’s birth, at the Serpentine North Gallery. It seems fitting that the staging coincides with the year in which the Bayeux Tapestry is to be shown at the British Museum in all its medieval majesty. Hockney makes no secret of being inspired by that archaic chronicler of William the Conqueror’s seizing of the crown, although he has expressed concern that the tapestry might suffer irreparable damage during transportation. In addition to Hockney’s frieze, one finds acrylic paintings, five portraits of people within the artist’s inner circle and five still lifes that have been specially created for the Serpentine Gallery.

In the autumn of his career, Hockney’s love of vivid colour seems, if anything, heightened by the passing of the years – his sheer absorption in the seasonal ebbing and flowing of the verdant Normandy landscape of his former home is there for all to see. One arrives here to find a quotation from the great man himself that instantly provides insight into his ambitions: “I have always believed that art should be a deep pleasure… There is always, everywhere, an enormous amount of suffering, but I believe that my duty as an artist is to overcome and alleviate the sterility of despair.” Comprising more than 100 iPad paintings, his monumental digital frieze, A Year in Normandie offers the viewer some much-needed visual tonic, a brief opportunity in our troubled world to breathe and soak up a bit of bucolic beauty. Aside from the Bayeux Tapestry, Hockney was also inspired by the horizontal storytelling format of 14^th century Chinese scroll paintings.

Working with a bespoke brushes app, the artist was able to paint plein air in the manner of the Impressionists, thus managing to quickly record transitions in light and weather. Having explored the creative potential of an iPad since 2010, Hockney captures subtle nuances of his French surroundings with aplomb. His charting of the changing of the seasons is dramatically lit and set against a dark-blue wall, displayed around the perimeter of the Serpentine North gallery. The constituent images were collaged together on a computer screen and enlarged before being printed on a single strip of paper. A raft of compositional highlights sear themselves into the retina as one walks the full length of the work: at the start spindly, leafless trees fade into the horizon in a landscape rendered in alternating green and white stripes; the striking terracotta of Hockney’s farmhouse’s roof set against a glorious azure blue sky; hay bales strewn throughout a lime green field before purple hued trees, their tops illuminated in cream; shimmering reflections in a pond; diagonal lilac rain blurring an otherwise idyllic landscape. Occasionally, a garden chair and table, a treehouse or barely discernible parked car allude to a human presence. Not all of the joins between the panels harmonise, but nonetheless, the overall effect is mesmerising.

Moving from beyond the confines of the gallery walls, Serpentine North have extended the experience by installing a large-scale digital print highlighting a scene depicting a tree house from A Year in Normandie. Displayed among the unfolding plants at the back of the North Gallery, the image’s monumentality serves to emphasise its recalling of Van Gogh’s Almond Blossom (1890) whilst underscoring the real garden’s seasonal reawakening.

Back inside Serpentine North, within the inner sanctum of this former British Army munitions store, one finds the ten new paintings made for the exhibition by Hockney in late 2025. The modern master is found continuing with his radical exploration of perception, blending abstraction and figuration. For him, figurative painting is by its very nature abstract, with the pigment applied to a flat surface. Here, Abstraction Resting on a Grey and White Checkered Tablecloth (2025) playfully conveys his belief. Visitors who have been to Hockney’s recent Annely Juda show will no doubt recognise the artist’s repeated usage of a gingham tablecloth as a motif, channelling his interest in inverse perspective as the tables providing the setting for all ten of these works slant towards us. The five new portraits depict people close to the 88-year-old Yorkshireman, including his partner and studio manager Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, great-nephew Richard and carer Thomas Mupfupi. The latter is wearing a Hockney-designed badge, which is thought to urge British politicians perceived by the painter to be hell-bent on preventing him from smoking in public places to “End Bossiness Soon”.

During a period of tremendous international unrest, this life-affirming exhibition provides much-needed respite, making a clarion call for us all to step back and take pleasure, like Hockney, in the hues and rhythms of everyday life. In his late 80s, arguably one of the world’s greatest living artists continues to reshape his painting practice, ingeniously challenging traditional Western planar perspective and conjuring vibrant compositions with flat areas of bold colour and inimitable draftsmanship. A Year in Normandie stands as a meditation on the passage of time, this whole show being a vital statement of intent to soak up every last drop of colour and beauty the world has to offer.