David Hockney, one of Britain’s most celebrated living artists, brings a luminous new exhibition to Serpentine North this spring. Running from 12 March to 23 August 2026, A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting invites visitors to step into the artist’s quietly dazzling world, where the seasons change, light shifts, and colour tells a story of time itself.
Image by George Darrell ©David Hockney
For David Hockney, now 88, these new works blend the intimate and the monumental. On one hand: five still lifes and five portraits capturing his closest circle, family members, friends, and carers, rendered against a recurring gingham tablecloth. On the other: the monumental 90-meter frieze A Year in Normandie (2020–2021), shown in London for the first time. Together they form a meditation on perception, memory, and the sheer pleasure of looking.
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.
David Hockney
The exhibition’s centrepiece fills the perimeter of the North Gallery with over a hundred digital iPad paintings, capturing the artist’s former garden in Normandy across four seasons. Created during the stillness of 2020, the work’s panoramic rhythm recalls both Chinese scrolls and the Bayeux Tapestry. Each scene a fragment of changing light and weather, together forming a modern fresco of endurance and renewal.
Photo: George Darrell
Photo: George Darrell
Outside, a large mural extends the experience into Serpentine’s garden. A printed evocation of spring featuring a tree house glimpsed through new leaves. It mirrors the same joy in observation that animates Hockney’s digital landscapes. Artistic Director Hans Ulrich Obrist adds, “At 88, Hockney continues to explore the language of painting with remarkable ingenuity, fusing abstract and figurative modes across still lifes, portraits, and landscape.”
David Hockney’s work invites us to slow down, to look closely, and to reconnect with the world around us
Bettina Korek, Serpentine’s CEO
Admission to the exhibition is free, a rare chance to experience one of the 20th and 21st centuries’ great painters in full, radiant form, surrounded by the turning seasons of Hyde Park.
