David Hockney has died, leaving London with the most visually seductive exhibition installation of the year as his obituary. A Year in Normandie, at the Serpentine’s North Gallery, plunges visitors into darkness before a stripe of landscape painting in bright colours runs around the wall — so luminous it looks on first glance like neon, and on second glance, like 3D.
The work consists of 130 paintings of views near Hockney’s home in Normandy, executed on an iPad and made in 2020 during the pandemic lockdown. The successive scenes tell a story of the seasons, from snow on bare branches through bright blossoms, saturated summer colours, glowering autumn clouds, and back to winter’s first snow. Hockney said the display was inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry, which he visited every fortnight in his first year in Normandy.
“David Hockney dies, leaving behind a stunning iPad-painting exhibition at the Serpentine that divides critics but delights visitors.”
Visitors were divided. “It’s the usual David Hockney because he always brings joy,” one art lover said. “I’ve been here a couple of times. The first time I left happy, the second time I left very happy,” another beamed. A quieter voice whispered: “It is not breaking any boundaries, but it is giving people what they want.” One critic confessed an internal monologue of resistance — “Pretty flowers, pretty trees, pretty paths, pretty skies… pretty inane” — yet admitted: “I can’t stop looking at them. And the more I look at them, the more I like them. Even though I am trying not to!”
Hockney, who began making iPad paintings in 2010, had never made them look so alluring. The exhibition, a relentless panorama of prettiness, amounted to a defiant final statement: it is enough for art to be beautiful.