David Hockney: Normandy and New Perspectives

At the Serpentine, digital drawings form the foundation for A Year in Normandie (2020-2021), a monumental 90-metre-long iPad frieze that records the changing landscape surrounding Hockney’s home in northern France. The work is composed of more than one hundred individual iPad drawings which together capture a panorama of the changing seasons. Viewers are invited to walk alongside it and experience the gradual passage of time as winter branches give way to blossom and the vivid colours spring, summer and autumn are ushered in.

The origins of the work came when Hockney first moved to Normandy in 2019. After spending decades moving between Los Angeles, Yorkshire and London, the artist relocated to the picturesque village of Beuvron-en-Auge, to a historic 17th century farmhouse named La Grande Cour, with his two assistants. The rustic timber-framed house contained a shack with a cider press, which was renovated to include a small studio for the artist as he began to paint the sinuous branches of the bare winter trees. Surrounded by orchards and small country roads, the property offered a peaceful environment in which to observe the natural rhythms of the landscape. Winter soon gave way to spring, as blossoms and flowers adorned the landscape around the house.

When Hockney moved in, his studio was not yet ready, and so he began to draw in a Japanese concertina sketchbook that he had bought in Amsterdam. The fold-out design of the pages allowed Hockney’s drawings to freely flow into one another, meaning that he could depict the temporally changing landscape from many different vantage points over time. Conceptually, this attentiveness to time and transformation formed the basis of A Year in Normandie. Returning to the medium of the iPad for this work, Hockney was liberated by the device as it afforded him greater portability and allowed him to work en plein air in all weathers, recording the countryside not as a single image but as a sequence of moments unfolding over time. In doing so, he found direct inspiration in the 11th century Bayeux Tapestry, which he claims to have seen more than 20 times in the last three years. Speaking in 2019 about the tapestry’s influence, he said, ‘It covers about four years of time, so it is made like a Chinese scroll… The arrival of spring takes about six weeks in Normandy, so I intend to do it like a scroll. It’s a movie, but you do the moving.’

In his landscapes, Hockney flattens the picture plane and investigates alternatives to single-point perspective. Rather than guiding the viewer’s eye towards a traditional vanishing point, he encourages a continually remaining gaze. Just as the landscape that he sat down to draw was living and breathing, our eyes move across the surface of his images, noticing textures, colours and relationships between forms, never once settling on any particular element.

Alongside A Year in Normandie, the Serpentine presents a series of brand new still life paintings, including Abstraction Resting on a Red and White Checkered Tablecloth. These works extend Hockney’s long-standing interest in perspective and abstraction and reflect his belief that ‘everything on a flat surface is an abstraction.’ Within this series of still life paintings, he experiments with a range of visual languages, deploying impasto and sweeping squeegee marks to create flattened but sculptural abstractions. These works challenge conventional perspective and encourage viewers to reflect on the act of seeing. The table surface itself, with its impossible perspective, functions almost like a stage, where colour, pattern and materiality coexist in shifting spatial relationships.

These recent abstractions resonate deeply with earlier moments in Hockney’s career, particularly in works from the 1990s, such as Slow Rise (1993). Created during a period when the artist was increasingly exploring abstraction in his work, Slow Rise uses layered forms and vibrant colour to generate a sense of rhythmic movement across the picture plane. Inspired heavily by Cubism, rather than depicting a recognisable landscape, the composition unfolds through overlapping shapes that guide the viewer’s gaze upwards through the image. The new tablecloth paintings share this concern with movement and spatial ambiguity. Although grounded in the still-life tradition, their interplay of pattern, colour and gesture dissolves the boundary between representation and abstraction. Seen in this context, the paintings suggest a continuity between Hockney’s earlier experiments with lithography and his more recent landscapes and abstract still lifes, examining how colour and form can create dynamic visual spaces that invite the viewer to move through the image rather than simply look at it.