David Hockney At Serpentine North
A Year in Normandie (detail), 2020-2021, composite iPad painting © David Hockney
Serpentine is honoured to announce an exhibition of recent works by David Hockney. Presented at Serpentine Northrom 12th March to 23rd August 2026, the exhibition will showcase seminal works, shown in the UK for the first time. Ad- mission will be free to the exhibition which is the artist’s first at Serpentine.
“I’m excited to present an exhibition at Serpentine in 2026.”
A Year in Normandie (detail), 2020-2021, composite iPad painting © David Hockney
“We are thrilled that David Hockney has accepted our invitation to present new works at Serpentine North in 2026. As a highlight of our Spring/Summer season, the exhibition promises to be a landmark cultural moment. Serpentine is free and open to all, and we look forward to welcoming audiences from near and far.”
David Hockney, London, 2023 © David Hockney Photo Credit: Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima
While the world came in the Spring of 2020, Hockney produced over a hundred images on his iPad within just a few weeks. Working digitally lets him capture the essence of each scene quickly and precisely. Much like the Impressionists, Hockney skilfully records changes in light and weather, but uses a vivid, radiant palette. His compositions combine flat areas of bold colour with playful pop-like touches. As the days pass, lockdown lifts, and spring transitions into summer, then autumn and winter. Hockney didn’t stop at painting spring, he captured the whole cycle of the year. The exhibition will include Hockney’s recent works: the celebrated Moon Room which reflects his lifelong interest in the cycle of light and time passing. It will also feature digital paintings from his Sunrise body of work.
A Year in Normandy, a ninety-metre-long frieze, inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry, showing the change of seasons at the artist’s former studio in Normandy, will also feature in the show. David Hockney is interested in how art and technology can come together in new ways. Recommending that people slow down and notice the beauty of the world around them, he believes that simple, everyday beauty, like a sunrise, is worth celebrating.
David Hockney
David Hockney (b. 1937 in Bradford, Yorkshire) has been at the forefront of the international art world for more than six decades. He emerged as one of the exceptional talents in the new generation of British artists in the early 1960s. Throughout his extraordinarily prolific career, he remains endlessly inventive and committed to celebrating the world around him.
Hockney is fascinated by the language of representation in a variety of forms. He explores the conventions of Chinese and Japanese painting as well as the traditions of European art. He experimented with abstraction; however, he steadfastly remains a figurative artist. Constantly questioning the world around him, he draws and paints from life, from memory, and from imagination.
Across his career he has created many bodies of works and numerous individual paintings which are now viewed as iconic. His experimental paintings in the early sixties announced the arrival of a new artistic voice. These were followed by a celebrated series of Hollywood swimming pools where the young Hockney arrived in 1964, documenting the city’s seductive charm and ambience from the position of an outsider. Often poetically titled, works such as A Bigger Splash and Beverly Hills Housewife have become celebrated paintings and part of the modern vernacular.
A deep fascination with perspective and a desire to investigate how we see and represent the world initiated a long and complicated relationship with the camera and lens. Hockney’s photographic collages in the 1980’s, with their cubist language and reliance on the fundamental concepts of drawing, challenged the limitations of the lens. Never afraid to push against the accepted doctrines of art history, his focus on past masters’ reliance on the lens as a painting device resulted in an in-depth study of the subject in both a book and BBC documentary, Secret Knowledge, published in 2001.
Hockney’s use of new technology is an extension of his interest in different modes of capturing an
image. From his polaroid composites to fax machine drawings and, in recent years, his iPad paintings, he seeks to exploit the potential of each technology in the creation of art. His life-long fascination with the possibilities of new media was recently given vibrant expression in Hockney’s ground-breaking multimedia show at Lightroom, first in London and now touring worldwide, which takes audiences on a personal journey through sixty years of Hockney’s life and charts the path of his artistic achievement throughout his career.
Hockney’s opera designs are a significant but lesser-known part of his oeuvre. Concentrating intensely on each commission, often for more than a year at a time, many of these designs, such as
The Rake’s Progress from 1975 and Puccini’s Turandot from 1990, continue to be performed decades after their debut.
From painting, drawing, printmaking, set design, and photography to media ranging from fax machines to iPads, Hockney demonstrates his deep understanding of art history coupled with his interest in modern technology to create new ways of seeing and presenting. David Hockney's rich and enduring body of work reveals his passion for contemporary life and curiosity about the world, epitomised by his signature phrase, “Love Life.”
A major exhibition of more than 400 of the artist’s works from 1955 to 2025 was recently presented at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris featuring international, institutional, and private collections’ works, as well as paintings from the artist’s own studio. The exhibition – curated at David Hockney’s request by Sir Norman Rosenthal, the former Exhibitions Secretary of London’s Royal Academy of Arts, in close collaboration with Suzanne Pagé, Artistic Director of Fondation Louis Vuitton, and her team brought together works in a variety of media including oil and acrylic painting, ink, pencil and charcoal drawing, digital art (iPhone, iPad, and computer drawings), immer- sive video installation and photographic drawing. Spanning seven decades of groundbreaking creativity, David Hockney 25 highlighted not only Hockney’s iconic early works but also places a special focus on the past 25 years, the early part of the 21st century, which has inspired the event's title.
About Serpentine
Building new connections between artists and audiences, Serpentine presents pioneering contemporary art exhibitions and cultural events with a legacy that stretches back over half a century, from a wide range of emerging practitioners to the most internationally recognised artists, writers, scientists, thinkers, and cultural thought leaders of our time.
Situated in London’s Kensington Gardens, across two sites, Serpentine North and Serpentine South, Serpentine features a year-round, free programme of exhibitions, architectural showcases, education, live events and technological activations, in the park and beyond the gallery walls. The Serpentine Pavilion is a yearly pioneering commission, which began in 2000 with Dame Zaha Hadid. It features the first UK structures by some of the biggest names in international architecture.
Public art has emerged as a central strand of Serpentine’s programme. Major presentations in- clude a collection of Eduardo Paolozzi’s sculptures (1987), Anish Kapoor’s Turning the World Upside Down (2010), Lee Ufan’s Relatum – Stage (2018-19), Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s London Mastaba in the Serpentine Lake (2018), I LOVE YOU EARTH by Yoko Ono (2021), Dominique Gonzalez-Foer- ster’s In remembrance of the coming alien (Alienor) (2022), Atta Kwami's DzidzƆ kple amenuveve (Joy and Grace) (2021-22), Gerhard Richter’s STRIP-TOWER (2023), Yayoi Kusama’s Pumpkin (2024) and Esther Mahlangu’s mural Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu (2024). Proud to maintain free access for all visitors, Serpentine also reaches an exceptionally broad au- dience and maintains a profound connection with its local community
For more information about this exhibition and others, please visit Serpentine’s website. Please also visit and follow Serpentine on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, along with TikTok.
