David Hockney, 88, Takes Aim at Abstraction as Serpentine Unfurls His 300-Foot Normandy iPad Frieze
David Hockney has never been shy about staking out a position, and at 88 he is still willing to argue for what painting should do. Speaking from his Kensington studio while recovering from an infection, the British artist David Hockney (b. 1937) offered a blunt assessment of the current art landscape: “There’s much too much abstract painting being done now.”
The remarks arrive as London’s Serpentine presents his latest exhibition, “A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts About Painting,” on view through August 23. Hockney was unable to attend in person, but the show itself makes his case with unusual clarity and scale.
At its center is a sweeping sequence of iPad drawings that stretches nearly 300 feet, forming a continuous frieze of the gardens around his home in Normandy. The images track the passage of the seasons — the quickening greens of spring, the density of summer, the thinning light of fall, the pared-back structures of winter — with the attentive steadiness of a daily practice. In an era when painting is often asked to justify itself against the camera, Hockney insists on a different hierarchy. “Photography can’t replace painting at all, but painting has to be of something,” he said.
That emphasis on observation and representation reads as a deliberate counterpoint to what he sees as abstraction’s dominance in contemporary art. Yet the exhibition is not a simple manifesto against non-figurative work. Elsewhere in the galleries, portraits and still lifes appear on reverse-perspective, checkered tablecloths — a spatial device that tilts the scene toward the viewer and heightens its constructedness. These works acknowledge the gravitational pull of abstraction, with references to painters such as Mark Rothko and Gerhard Richter, while remaining anchored in recognizable subjects.
Hockney’s technical restlessness is also on view. He has been experimenting with a stippling method that involves building layers of paint even while the surface is still wet, a process he connects to the kinds of marks he developed through drawing on the iPad. “These marks are a bit different,” he said, framing the shift as part of an ongoing search for new pictorial language without abandoning the premise that painting begins with looking.
The show’s length and narrative sweep inevitably invite comparison to another famed image sequence: the Bayeux Tapestry. That medieval embroidery is expected to travel to London for a major British Museum exhibition, a move Hockney has criticized as “madness.” At the Serpentine, the dialogue is not only about scale but about subject and temperament. The Bayeux Tapestry is a chronicle of war and conquest; Hockney’s Normandy cycle is a sustained meditation on weather, color, and the quiet rhythms of domestic landscape.
“There is no war or death in my picture,” he said, echoing a phrase he has returned to in recent years: “Remember, they can’t cancel the spring.” In the context of the exhibition, the line lands less as a slogan than as a statement of artistic purpose — a belief that painting’s power lies in its capacity to hold attention on the world as it is seen, season by season, mark by mark.
