David Hockney’s Final London Exhibition Closes at Serpentine

Event: David Hockney: A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting

Venue: Serpentine North

Location: Kensington Gardens, London, UK

Dates: March 12 to August 23, 2026

David Hockney’s exhibition A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting closed at Serpentine North on 23 August, ending a presentation that acquired unexpected significance following the artist’s death in June.

The exhibition opened on 12 March as Hockney’s first presentation at Serpentine. Free to visit and installed at the gallery’s North building in Kensington Gardens, it brought together new paintings and a large-scale digital work centred on the changing seasons surrounding the artist’s former studio in Normandy.

At the time of its opening, the exhibition could be approached primarily as another chapter in Hockney’s long and unusually varied career. After his death, however, its position inevitably changed. Audiences encountered the presentation as one of the artist’s final major London statements.

A Final London Exhibition

Hockney died peacefully at home on 11 June 2026, aged 88, one month before what would have been his 89th birthday.

Tributes followed from across British public and cultural life. King Charles III described Hockney as “a giant of the world of art and painting, a Yorkshireman through and through, and a dear friend and inspiration to so many”.

The tribute emphasised not only Hockney’s importance as a painter but also his distinctive public character: humorous, independent and unmistakably himself.

That sense of individuality was central to the Serpentine exhibition.

Rather than presenting a conventional retrospective survey, the show concentrated on Hockney’s continuing commitment to looking. Its premise was modest but far-reaching: familiar surroundings can remain visually inexhaustible when they are observed carefully enough.

Serpentine presented the new works as an extension of Hockney’s lifelong fascination with seeing and with the possibility that ordinary beauty can reward sustained attention.

A Year in Normandie

The exhibition’s most imposing work was A Year in Normandie, a panoramic frieze approximately 90 metres long.

Created from around 100 iPad paintings, the work recorded the transformation of the landscape surrounding Hockney’s former Normandy studio through the changing seasons.

Its scale connected the work to historical forms of visual storytelling, most notably the Bayeux Tapestry, which served as an important point of inspiration.

Hockney, however, replaced embroidered cloth with digital images created on an iPad, transforming a device associated with everyday communication into the basis for an expansive meditation on time, landscape and observation.

The result produced an unusual tension between intimacy and monumentality.

Although the frieze was designed to be experienced as a continuous environment, its individual sections retained the immediacy of drawings made directly on a screen.

Visitors could follow the broad movement of the year while noticing the smaller shifts in colour, vegetation, light and weather that gave the panorama its rhythm.

David Hockney: A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting, installation view, Serpentine North, 2026 © David Hockney. Photo: George Darrell

Painting in the Digital Age

The relationship between digital technology and physical exhibition space became one of the most interesting questions raised by the presentation.

Hockney had experimented with new technologies throughout his career, treating photography, fax machines, digital drawing and the iPad not as alternatives to painting but as extensions of his investigation into how images are made and experienced.

At Serpentine, however, the monumental presentation of A Year in Normandie also exposed the complicated relationship between screen-based work and the gallery.

In The Guardian, critic Ben Eastham questioned whether the visual impact of the frieze entirely survived its transition into physical space, suggesting that aspects of the work could appear more convincing on a phone than at its full architectural scale.

The criticism pointed towards a productive difficulty rather than a simple failure.

Hockney’s iPad works challenged the assumption that traditional painting automatically carries greater artistic seriousness than digital image-making. At the same time, their presentation demonstrated how profoundly scale, medium and exhibition context influence the way an image is perceived.

Landscape Inside and Outside the Gallery

The exhibition’s location in Kensington Gardens introduced another dimension to the work.

Hockney’s Normandy landscape was not reconstructed literally inside Serpentine North, yet the surrounding park created a visual dialogue between the depicted natural world and the living environment immediately beyond the gallery walls.

Visitors moved between Hockney’s representation of seasonal change and an actual landscape undergoing its own transformations outside.

The relationship became particularly noticeable during the exhibition’s final weeks.

Responding to popular demand, Serpentine extended opening hours until 9pm on selected Fridays and Saturdays in August, allowing visitors to experience the work as daylight gradually changed across Kensington Gardens.

The setting reinforced one of Hockney’s most persistent ideas: looking is never entirely finished because the world itself never remains visually static.

An Exhibition Changed by Circumstance

The exhibition also became a revealing example of how the meaning of an exhibition can shift without its curatorial structure changing at all.

Serpentine did not transform the show into a memorial following Hockney’s death.

Its original title remained. The works remained in place. The exhibition continued according to its existing framework.

Yet the circumstances in which visitors encountered those works were fundamentally different.

What had initially opened as a celebration of continued creativity in old age became, through circumstances no curator could have anticipated, a final public encounter with one of Britain’s most influential painters.

Works concerned with passing seasons, changing landscapes and the experience of time inevitably acquired additional resonance.

The transformation occurred not within the artworks themselves but within the audience’s knowledge of them.

The Persistence of Looking

Hockney’s significance has long extended beyond any single style or medium.

Across painting, drawing, photography and digital experimentation, he repeatedly returned to fundamental questions about perception: how space is constructed, how colour changes experience and how images can encourage viewers to look differently at familiar surroundings.

A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting continued that investigation without attempting to provide a final conclusion.

Its scale may have been ambitious, but its underlying proposition remained remarkably simple.

Look carefully. Look repeatedly. Do not assume that familiarity means there is nothing more to see.

That principle feels particularly significant now that the exhibition has closed.

Its most lasting image may ultimately be neither the monumental scale of the Normandy frieze nor the circumstances surrounding Hockney’s death, but the artist’s continuing insistence that attention itself can remain a creative act.

By concentrating on a landscape he knew intimately and observing it through changing seasons, Hockney demonstrated once again that even the most familiar subject can become unfamiliar when examined closely enough.

The Serpentine exhibition therefore concluded not simply as a presentation of late work, but as a final reminder of an idea that shaped much of Hockney’s career: the world remains worth looking at.

Website

serpentinegalleries.org