David Hockney’s first exhibition at London’s Serpentine Gallery, A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting, pairs a 90 meter frieze composed from hundreds of iPad paintings with new 2025 canvases. Installed as a continuous ribbon, the frieze traces seasonal change around his home, while the exhibition as a whole revisits perception, landscape, and painting itself.
Spanning more than seven decades, the career of David Hockney has been marked by an unusual willingness to experiment. From early Pop inflected paintings to photographic collages, stage design, and digital drawing, he has continually sought new ways to represent the visible world.
The exhibition at the Serpentine North Gallery brings these strands into dialogue, pairing a monumental landscape cycle with recent portraits and still lifes that return to fundamental questions of perspective and observation.
At the center of the exhibition is A Year in Normandie, created between 2020 and 2021 after the artist settled in the French countryside. With his studio still under construction, Hockney worked outdoors, using an iPad to record the slow transformation of the surrounding landscape from winter frost to spring blossom, from the dense greens of summer to the warmer tones of autumn.
The finished work brings together more than two hundred digital images into a single panoramic composition. Its format recalls the medieval Bayeux Tapestry, long admired by Hockney. Like that historic narrative, the composition unfolds sequentially, inviting viewers to walk alongside it and experience the passage of time through space.
The work also draws on Chinese scroll painting, which presents shifting viewpoints rather than a fixed perspective. Instead of a single vantage point, the landscape opens gradually, mirroring the way vision accumulates as the body moves through an environment.
Alongside this panoramic work, the exhibition features a recent series titled Some Other Thoughts About Painting (2025). Comprising five portraits and five still lifes, the series is structured around a recurring motif, a checkered tablecloth rendered in reverse perspective. By tilting the surface toward the viewer, Hockney destabilizes conventional spatial logic and foregrounds the constructed nature of pictorial space.
The portraits depict figures close to the artist, including his partner Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima and studio collaborators. They function less as conventional likenesses and more as studies of perception, showing how time, attention, and personal relationships shape painting.
The still lifes continue this exploration, referencing styles from color field to richly textured surfaces. Each work reflects on the history of painting while highlighting the tension between illusion and flatness.
The works on view present an artist still deeply engaged with the fundamental problems of seeing. By combining digital processes with art historical references, Hockney continues to test how painting can convey lived experience, whether through the slow rhythms of landscape or the concentrated intimacy of portraiture.
