David Hockney: A Year in Normandie (Detail)
This mural is part of the exhibition David Hockney: A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting at Serpentine North (12 March – 23 August 2026).
Composed of over a hundred iPad paintings created near the artist’s studio in the countryside of northern France during the 2020 COVID lockdown, A Year in Normandie captures the changing seasons over the course of twelve months. The enlarged detail presented here marks the beginning of spring and places Hockney’s impressions of the Normandy countryside, created en plein air, in dialogue with the landscape of Kensington Gardens.
David Hockney (b. 1937 in Bradford, Yorkshire, UK) is one of the most influential artists of our time. Throughout his seven-decade spanning career, the British artist remains endlessly inventive and committed to celebrating the world around him, epitomised by his signature phrase, “Love Life.” A deep fascination with perspective and a desire to investigate how we see and represent the world led him to explore a range of artistic mediums from painting to photographic collages, set design, drawing and printmaking. Hockney’s use of new technology is an extension of his interest in different modes of capturing reality. From his Polaroid composites to fax machine drawings and, in recent years, his iPad paintings, he seeks to unlock the potential of each technology for the creation of art.
David Hockney’s work has been presented in major solo exhibitions in institutions worldwide, including Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2025); Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2023); Tate Britain, Centre Pompidou and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2017), among many others. David Hockney has been honoured with many prestigious awards, including his recognition as a Companion of Honour from the British and Commonwealth Order for his outstanding achievement in the arts in 1997. He recently received the Officier in France’s Légion d’Honneur award (2026). David Hockney’s work is part of numerous public collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the Art Institute of Chicago; the National Portrait Gallery, London; Tate Britain, London; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
