David Hockney's first exhibition at the Serpentine brought his panoramic iPad frieze A Year in Normandie, built on the model of the Bayeux Tapestry, to London for the first time.
David Hockney’s first exhibition at the Serpentine brought his iPad frieze A Year in Normandie to London for the first time. It ran at Serpentine North Gallery in Kensington Gardens from Thursday 12 March to Sunday 23 August 2026.
Hockney was born in Bradford in 1937. Over seven decades he has worked across painting, photographic collage, set design, drawing and printmaking. He has treated each new technology, from Polaroid composites to fax machines to the iPad, as another way of studying how people see.
He made A Year in Normandie on the iPad at the studio he kept in Normandy. Its structure comes from the Bayeux Tapestry: a frieze that runs the length of a room and records the seasons in the garden outside his window.
He has had solo shows at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris and the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. His paintings hang in the Met, MoMA, Tate Britain and the Centre Pompidou. He was made a Companion of Honour in 1997 and received France’s Légion d’Honneur in 2026.
The exhibition was conceived with the artist. New paintings hung beside the frieze, facing the trees and lawns outside the gallery’s windows.