The popularity of David Hockney exhibitions continues with the announcement of the Serpentine Galleries’ first-ever show by the UK artist, due to launch next year at the Serpentine North gallery (12 March-23 August 2026).
The exhibition will feature A Year in Normandy (2020-21), a 90-metre-long frieze inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry, showing the change of seasons at the artist’s former studio in Normandy. The Bayeux Tapestry is due to go on show at the British Museum late next year.
Hockney’s iPad images, produced during the Covid-19 pandemic, will also feature. “His compositions combine flat areas of bold colour with playful pop-like touches,” says a gallery statement. “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.”
Hockney’s recent works, the Moon Room—which, according to the gallery, “reflects his lifelong interest in the cycle of light and time passing”,—will also be on show, alongside digital paintings from the artist’s Sunrise body of work.
Hockney shows are a proven crowd-pleaser; his retrospective at Tate Britain in 2017 drew more than 478,000 visitors. The largest-ever exhibition on the British artist also recently took over the entire Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, attracting thousands more visitors.
Meanwhile, Annely Juda Fine Art has announced that the opening show in its new gallery in London’s Hanover Square will also be dedicated to Hockney. The exhibition, opening this winter (7 November-28 February), will include a series of new paintings made in the past six months.
“These very, very, very new paintings mark the most developed stage yet in Hockney’s dedication to ‘reverse perspective’ in paint”, says a gallery statement. “In these recent canvases, which depict colourful interior scenes, he disrupts planar perspective and engineers multiple vanishing points in a single picture, bringing us closer to the lived experience of perception.”