David Hockney at Serpentine: Painting Time, Perception, and the Infinite View

For more than six decades, David Hockney has returned to a deceptively simple question: how do we actually see? Not according to the rigid geometry of Renaissance perspective, nor through the singular mechanical eye of the camera, but as moving, living beings—perceiving the world through time, memory, and the restless motion of the body in space. At Serpentine North, A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting offers one of the clearest and most expansive demonstrations of that lifelong inquiry.

The exhibition centers on A Year in Normandie (2020–2021), a monumental composite iPad painting stretching nearly eighty meters in length. Constructed from more than two hundred digital drawings made after Hockney moved to a farmhouse in Normandy in 2019, the work unfolds as a sweeping visual journey through the changing seasons. Bare winter branches dissolve into sudden bursts of pale blossom; tender greens gather density as spring thickens into summer; fields blaze in deep emerald before shifting toward the warm rusts, golds, and ochres of autumn. Color moves across the frieze like weather itself—brightening, softening, deepening—so that the landscape seems to breathe and transform along its vast span. At first glance the work appears to function as a landscape, yet in its structure and ambition it becomes something more expansive: a meditation on duration, perception, and painting’s capacity to register the passage of time.

Encountered in the gallery, the work is experienced less as a single image than as a passage through space. As viewers move alongside the vast frieze, the scenery gradually unfolds before them, the eye shifting between near and distant elements. Rather than fixing the viewer before a single perspective, the composition invites movement—echoing the way vision continually scans and reconstructs the world.

The Bayeux Tapestry and the Logic of Movement

The origins of the work lie in several strands of Hockney’s thinking that converge here with remarkable clarity. The first is his lifelong fascination with the Bayeux Tapestry, whose seventy-meter narrative embroidery recounts the Norman conquest of England in 1066. Hockney’s relationship with the work stretches back to childhood. As he recalled in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, one of his earliest memories was seeing an image of Harold struck in the eye by an arrow. “I saw the picture of Harold with an arrow shooting into his eye,” Hockney remembered. The image remained with him for decades, eventually drawing him to Bayeux itself.

What captivated him was the tapestry’s unfolding pictorial logic. Rather than presenting a single fixed image, it reveals events gradually as the viewer walks alongside it. In this sense, it operates less like a conventional painting than like a visual narrative experienced through movement.

The Possibility of an Alternative Perspective

Equally important for David Hockney has been his engagement with Chinese scroll painting, which he first encountered in 1983 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Unlike Western paintings governed by linear perspective, Chinese scrolls invite viewers to travel through landscapes that expand and contract as the eye moves along the image. Perspective shifts continuously; space unfolds rather than recedes. Hockney later recalled returning to Bayeux in 2018 and suddenly recognizing in the embroidery something akin to that earlier revelation. “It was like a Chinese scroll,” he said. “No shadows, no reflections.” The comparison crystallized a long-standing intuition: that Renaissance perspective—positioning the viewer outside the image before a stable vanishing point—represents only one possible way of organizing vision.

Much of Hockney’s work since the 1970s has been devoted to challenging this inherited pictorial system. Western painting traditionally organizes space through linear perspective—a mathematical method designed to simulate depth from a single fixed viewpoint. Yet Hockney has repeatedly argued that such a system bears little resemblance to how humans actually experience the world. Vision is mobile and temporal. We look up, down, sideways, and back again; we remember what we saw moments before. A scene is assembled gradually rather than absorbed all at once.

This insight links Hockney to earlier modern attempts to dismantle the tyranny of the single viewpoint. In particular, the experiments of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque during the early twentieth century fractured objects into multiple simultaneous perspectives. Cubism proposed that space could be constructed through overlapping viewpoints rather than through a single vanishing point—an idea that continues to resonate in Hockney’s investigations of moving vision. His own explorations pursue a similar question through different means: how might painting convey the lived experience of seeing rather than the static geometry of a camera lens?

One of his earliest responses to this problem appeared in the celebrated photographic “joiners” of the early 1980s—collages composed of dozens of Polaroids assembled into fractured panoramas. These works abandon the seamless illusion of photographic space in favor of a field of shifting viewpoints, echoing the way the eye scans and reconstructs a scene. A Year in Normandie can be understood as a continuation of that exploration, now translated into painting and extended across a monumental scale.

David Hockney Painting the Seasons in Normandy

In Normandy, these concerns found a new immediacy. No longer able to spend long days painting outdoors as he had done in Yorkshire, David Hockney turned to the iPad, a tool he has embraced since 2010. Working often from inside his truck, he could quickly record the surrounding fields, trees, and sky as they changed from day to day. The device allowed him to paint rapidly, preserving the immediacy of perception rather than laboring through the slower processes of traditional oil painting. “I never took any photographs, I just made 220 paintings,” Hockney has said of the Normandy cycle. In this sense, the digital medium becomes not a departure from painting but an extension of it—another instrument through which he pursues his central concern with observation.

What distinguishes A Year in Normandie is the way it transforms these individual observations into a continuous pictorial field. Over time, Hockney digitally joined many of the drawings together, forming a vast frieze that moves fluidly through the seasons. Though based on direct observation, the final composition is carefully constructed. Scenes are sometimes repositioned or repeated; the seams between images remain subtly visible, creating small disruptions in time and space that echo the discontinuities of perception. The cycle begins in winter, passes through blossom and summer abundance, and returns again to frost and bare branches. Trees become the central protagonists of the image, while human presence appears only occasionally in the form of chairs, paths, or distant structures.

The work inevitably recalls the ambitions of nineteenth-century landscape painters such as Claude Monet, whose serial paintings of haystacks, poplars, and Rouen Cathedral sought to capture the changing effects of light across time. Yet Hockney pushes this impulse further. Rather than presenting a sequence of separate canvases, he compresses the cycle of the year into a single unfolding image. The landscape becomes not merely a view but a duration—an extended experience of time articulated through painting.

The writer Olivia Laing, in her essay accompanying the exhibition, captures this temporal dimension with particular clarity. In a garden, she observes, time does not move according to the rigid chronology of calendars or clocks. It moves cyclically, through growth and decay, blossom and fruit, recurrence and return. In this sense, A Year in Normandie becomes not simply a landscape but a portrait of time itself.

Still Lifes and Reverse Perspective

The second half of the exhibition, titled Some Other Thoughts about Painting, brings these reflections into a more intimate register. Created in late 2025, the series consists of five portraits and five still lifes, each painted in acrylic on canvas and unified by the recurring motif of a checkered tablecloth rendered in reverse perspective. Unlike conventional perspective, which recedes toward a distant vanishing point, reverse perspective tilts the pictorial plane outward toward the viewer. The effect is subtle yet quietly disorienting: objects appear to lean forward, collapsing the distance between image and observer. As David Hockney puts it, “Reverse perspective is more truthful, I think. Because we’re in movement. The eye is always in movement; otherwise, we’re dead.”

The still lifes—Abstraction Resting on a Blue and White Checkered Tablecloth, Abstraction Resting on a Grey and White Checkered Tablecloth, Another Abstraction Resting on a Blue and White Checkered Tablecloth, Abstraction Resting on a Green and White Checkered Tablecloth, and Abstraction Resting on a Red and White Checkered Tablecloth—playfully engage the visual languages of modern abstraction. Each canvas evokes a different painterly approach, from balanced color-field compositions to denser surfaces suggestive of impasto or squeegee techniques. Yet these abstract images are placed within unmistakably representational settings, resting upon the patterned tablecloth. The result is a witty reversal of categories: abstraction appears within representation, while representation itself reveals its abstract structure.

Hockney has long insisted that every image is, in some sense, an abstraction. “Everything on a flat surface is an abstraction,” he has remarked—a statement that resonates strongly throughout this series. The tablecloth becomes both object and pictorial device, anchoring the works while simultaneously destabilizing spatial logic.

Portraiture and the Experience of Looking

The portraits extend this investigation into the domain of human presence. Hockney has consistently approached portraiture less as a search for likeness than as an extended act of looking. The sitters in this series—Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, Richard Hockney, Joe Hage, Jack Ransome, and Thomas Mupfupi—belong to the artist’s immediate circle of family, collaborators, and friends. Their familiarity lends the paintings an unusual intimacy. Completed over several days, the works record the slow rhythm of observation: the sitter’s posture, the slight shift of expression, the accumulation of brushstrokes that gradually construct the image.

Several of these portraits introduce additional art-historical layers. In Joe Hage Resting on a Green and White Checkered Tablecloth, the sitter appears before Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Tower of Babel (1563). Hockney has long admired Bruegel’s painting for the way its spatial structure allows the eye to travel both upward and downward through the composition, echoing the shifting viewpoints he encountered in Chinese scrolls decades earlier. Enlarging the tower behind Hage transforms the portrait into a meditation on painting itself—its illusions, its histories, and its enduring capacity to construct complex spatial worlds.

Elsewhere, backgrounds reference the landscapes of Normandy, linking the portraits directly to the monumental frieze. The exhibition thus moves fluidly between scales—from the eighty-meter panorama of seasonal change to the intimate exchange between artist and sitter—while maintaining a coherent investigation of pictorial space.

David Hockney and Painting as a Living Field of Perception

What unites the works in A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting is Hockney’s enduring conviction that painting remains uniquely capable of exploring perception. Photography captures a fraction of a second; painting unfolds through duration. It records the movement of the eye, the persistence of memory, and the presence of the body in space. Even after seven decades of experimentation across drawing, photography, stage design, and digital media, Hockney continues to return to painting as the most elastic and expansive language available to him.

That commitment is especially evident in the portraits, where the medium becomes a way of registering not merely appearance but encounter. “The presence of the person sitting in front of you—that’s what I’m trying to capture,” David Hockney has said. It is a concise definition of portraiture, but also of the exhibition as a whole: a sustained attempt to make painting answer to presence, duration, and the unstable, living truth of sight.

At 88, Hockney’s curiosity appears undiminished. Rather than offering a retrospective conclusion, the Serpentine exhibition reads as a renewed declaration of painting’s possibilities. A Year in Normandie may depict a particular garden and a single year, yet its deeper subject is far broader: the experience of time as it unfolds through looking. Walking alongside the vast frieze, the viewer does not simply observe a landscape but moves through it, much like traversing a scroll or following the embroidered narrative of Bayeux. The image becomes something lived rather than merely seen.

What David Hockney ultimately proposes is both simple and quietly radical. Painting, in his hands, is not a static window onto the world but a living field of perception—expansive enough to hold memory, movement, and the rhythms of time itself.

David Hockney: A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting is on view at the Serpentine North Gallery, 12 March – 23 August, 2026.