At Serpentine, David Hockney asks us to pause and observe the passing of time

It’s fitting that an exhibition that ponders the passing of time opens in the first warm days of spring, but David Hockney has been nothing if not perceptive to subtle shifts in mood throughout his seven-decade career.

After his major retrospective at Fondation Louis Vuitton last year, which united more than 400 of his works, from 1955 to 2025, the new exhibition at London’s Serpentine, ‘A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting’, offers a more intimate peek into Hockney’s world, and is none the worse for it. Rather than a vast overview of his career, here we have a more focused insight into Hockney as the artist he is now.

At 88, Hockney continues to be drawn to everyday fluctuations, in light, mood and season. Encircling the exhibition space is a panoramic frieze of more than 100 iPad paintings that Hockney created during lockdown in 2020, documenting the changing daily view from his former studio in Normandy, France.

While inspired by both the Bayeux Tapestry and Chinese scroll paintings in their horizontal, narrative format, these works are unapologetically modern. Hockney’s experiments in creating digital paintings on the iPad encompass flat planes of colour, reminiscent of his saturated Los Angeles swimming pools in the 1960s, but here defined by the rich green of the French countryside as it fades into winter and springs back into life.

Thrilling, at Serpentine, is a series of ten new works created in late 2025 for this exhibition. The five still-lifes and five portraits offer a glimpse into Hockney’s daily life now, populated by the friends, family and carers who are closest to him. There is a uniformity running through these new works, which are united by their straight-on perspective and the checkered-tablecloth stage, gently angled towards our perspective as viewers.

Sitters, who include Hockney’s partner and studio manager Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, his great-nephew Richard Hockney and close acquaintance Joe Hage, are drawn with fond personal and mischievous detailing. Jack Ransome, who designed Hockney’s glasses, smirks in his portrait, while carer Thomas Mupfupi is proudly sporting a badge Hockney designed, ‘END BOSSINESS SOON’.

In the five still-lifes, Hockney continues his exploration into a blend of the abstract and figurative, with works such as Abstraction Resting on a Grey and White Checkered Tablecloth offering a considered development on his belief that all figurative painting is abstract, as long as it is on a flat surface. By playfully juxtaposing the two, Hockney is still asking us to do the only thing that matters – to see.

David Hockney, 'A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting' at Serpentine North, free to view, from 12 March – 23 August 2026

serpentinegalleries.org