David Hockney’s Monumental ‘A Year in Normandie’ Lands at Serpentine Next Week
On 12 March, David Hockney’s first-ever exhibition at Serpentine opens in London. Bringing his monumental A Year in Normandie to the capital for the first time — alongside new paintings and a garden mural — here’s what to expect.
This spring, David Hockney takes over Serpentine North for the first time. From 12 March to 23 August 2026, David Hockney: A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting brings together new paintings and one of the most expansive works of his career — a ninety-metre digital frieze that has never before been shown in London.
The headline work is A Year in Normandie (2020–2021), made on an iPad at Hockney’s former home in northern France. Installed around the perimeter of the gallery, it unfolds as a continuous panorama of the landscape outside his studio window. Visitors move along it as they would along a scroll, watching spring turn to summer, then autumn and winter. The format nods to the Bayeux Tapestry and to Chinese handscrolls, but the sensibility is unmistakably Hockney: bold colour, flattened space, a clear-eyed delight in trees, hedges, blossom and sky.
The frieze was produced in spring 2020, when lockdown confined him to his Normandy garden. Working digitally, he documented the year as it unfolded — tree by tree, sunrise by sunrise.Around this sweeping seasonal study, the exhibition narrows its focus. A new group of still lifes and portraits, made for Serpentine, centres on people from Hockney’s close circle, including family members and carers.
Other recent works extend his attention to cycles of light and time. The Moon Room and digital paintings from the Sunrise series continue his habit of returning to the same motifs — a window, a tree, a horizon — and finding something new in repetition.
The exhibition also spills outdoors. In the garden at Serpentine North, a large-scale printed mural drawn from the spring section of A Year in Normandie will be installed against the back of the gallery. The image of a tree house, originally made in Normandy, will sit within Kensington Gardens, creating a quiet exchange between painted landscape and living one.
A catalogue designed by Hockney accompanies the show, including new writing by Marco Livingstone and Olivia Laing, as well as a conversation with Serpentine Artistic Director Hans Ulrich Obrist.
At 88, Hockney remains preoccupied with the fundamentals: how we see, how we register time passing, how colour constructs space. This exhibition does not attempt to survey a career. The emphasis is on recent work — especially the Normandy cycle — and on a fresh series of paintings made for this show.
David Hockney at Serpentine North
12th March – 23rd August 2026
Free
More information: https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/david-hockney-a-year-in-normandie-and-some-other-thoughts-about-painting-exhibition-serpentine-galleries/
Featured image: David Hockney, A Year in Normandy (detail), 2020-2021. Composite iPad painting © David Hockney
Elena Leo is the Culture & Lifestyle Editor of Ikon London Magazine.
