David Hockney at the Serpentine: Painting Time in the Digital Age
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
Dana Aben
At the Serpentine North Gallery, David Hockney’s A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts About Painting unfolds as both a meditation on time and a reconfiguration of how painting operates in the digital age. Moving from Kensington Gardens into the gallery, one is struck by a subtle continuity: the landscape seems to extend inward, translated into Hockney’s vivid, digital surfaces. The exhibition thus stages a quiet but compelling transition, from the physical environment into its mediated image. In doing so, the works blur distinctions between the direct perception and representation, inviting the viewer to question where the ‘real’ landscape ends and its pictorial reimagining begin. The exhibition positions Hockney not as a nostalgic modernist, but as an artist persistently rethinking how we see.
At the centre of the exhibition is A Year in Normandie (2020–21), a monumental panoramic frieze stretching around the gallery’s perimeter. Conceived over the course of twelve months, the work is among Hockney’s most ambitious, emerging from the period in which he first settled into his studio in rural Normandy in 2019. Composed from over two hundred digital studies, of which around half are displayed, the work charts the changing seasons, from winter frost to summer bloom. Its format draws on the narrative unfolding of the eleventh-century Bayeux Tapestry and the spatial fluidity of Chinese scroll painting, collapsing time into a continuous visual field. As one moves along the work, the experience is not simply observational but durational: the viewer walks through time as much as space, an effect heightened by the frieze’s installation along the gallery’s curved architecture.
In this sense, A Year in Normandie functions as a portrait of 2020 itself, a year marked by global isolation, in which attention was redirected toward the slow passage of time and the cyclical rhythms of nature. This dialogue between lived experience and representation extends beyond the gallery walls: an enlarged detail from the frieze’s spring cycle is installed in the Serpentine North Garden, placing Hockney’s Normandy landscape in direct conversation with the shifting seasons of London, and further collapsing the boundary between image and environment.
This temporal immersion is further intensified by Hockney’s use of the iPad. First adopting the device in 2010, his digital practice allows for a speed and immediacy akin to Impressionist en plein air painting. Trees, skies, and fields are rendered with a looseness that suggests both spontaneity and control, the medium enables Hockney to capture fleeting changes in light and atmosphere, yet the resulting images retain a distinctly constructed quality. Colour is often heightened to the point of artificiality: acidic greens, electric blues, and vivid pinks verge on the naïve, recalling both Paul Cézanne’s structural landscapes and in Hockney’s sustained attention to shifting light, weather, and atmosphere, the pastoral intensity of John Constable, albeit filtered through a contemporary, screen-based sensibility.
What is particularly striking, however, is the visibility of process. Hockney does not smooth over the imperfections of digital drawing; instead, he leaves behind gestural traces, loose marks, apparent scribbles, clusters of dots, that register the immediacy of observation. These marks resist the polished finish often associated with digital imagery, reintroducing a sense of tactility and spontaneity. The treatment of foliage, built up through dispersed dots and layered strokes, recalls the optical fragmentation of Georges Seurat’s pointillism. Yet unlike Seurat’s systematic approach, Hockney’s marks feel intuitive, even playful, emphasising perception over precision.
At the same time, there is something fundamentally intangible about these works. They oscillate between the material and the virtual: printed images that retain the luminosity of the screen, landscapes that feel both immediate and mediated. This tension is compounded by Hockney’s radical treatment of perspective. Space tilts, reverses, and folds, denying the viewer a stable vantage point. The result is a landscape that is recognisable yet elusive.
This tension continues in the exhibition’s second body of work, Some Other Thoughts About Painting (2025), installed in the gallery’s central rooms. Comprising five still-lives alongside five portraits of figures from Hockney’s close circle, including family members and carers, the series is unified by a striking formal consistency. Each composition is presented frontally and structured around the recurring motif of a gingham tablecloth, which serves as both setting and compositional anchor. Within this seemingly ordered framework, Hockney deliberately destabilises representation, combining abstract and figurative modes of painting. Among these works, Richard Resting on a Red and White Checkered Tablecloth stands out as a particularly compelling example. The composition centres on a seated figure, framed by the insistent geometry of the checkered cloth. Yet the tablecloth, rendered in reverse perspective, tilts forward unnaturally, collapsing the distinction between depth and surface. The figure appears suspended between representation and pattern, presence and abstraction, as if caught within the very mechanics of painting itself.
Here, Hockney’s engagement with painting becomes more self-reflexive. The checkered cloth functions not only as a compositional device but as a conceptual anchor, foregrounding the flatness of the painted surface while simultaneously destabilising it. In Richard Resting on a Red and White Checkered Tablecloth, this tension is intensified through the subject’s direct gaze, which meets the viewer head-on. Rather than receding into illusionistic space, the figure confronts us, reinforcing the painting’s frontal construction and collapsing the distance between viewer and image. If the Normandy frieze immerses the viewer in time, these works draw attention back to the act of painting itself, to the constructed nature of the image, the conditions of its making, and the reciprocal relationship between seeing and being seen.
And yet, as engaging as these paintings are, it is difficult not to return to the frieze. Its ever-changing, encircling view, its continuous unfolding of seasons, remains the exhibition’s most compelling achievement. It is here that Hockney’s exploration of time, perception, and technology coalesces, producing an experience that is at once immersive and quietly disorienting.
Hockney has long argued that “new ways of seeing mean new ways of feeling,” and this exhibition gives that claim renewed urgency. By embracing digital tools while remaining deeply embedded within the history of painting, he positions the medium not as a fixed tradition but as a mutable, evolving practice. The iPad does not signal a break with painting; rather, it extends its logic, enabling new ways of registering time, space, and perception.
David Hockney: A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting is on display at Serpentine North until the 23rd August 2026.
