​Presented at Serpentine North from 12th March to 23rd August 2026, the exhibition will showcase seminal works, shown in the UK for the first time. Admission will be free to the exhibition which is the artist’s first at Serpentine. 

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​From painting, drawing, printmaking, set design, and photography to media ranging from fax machines to iPads, Hockney demonstrates his deep understanding of art history coupled with his interest in modern technology to create new ways of seeing and presenting. David Hockney's rich and enduring body of work reveals his passion for contemporary life and curiosity about the world, epitomized by his signature phrase, “Love Life.” 

A major exhibition of more than 400 of the artist’s works from 1955 to 2025 was recently presented at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris featuring international, institutional, and private collections’ works, as well as paintings from the artist’s own studio. The exhibition – curated at David Hockney’s request by Sir Norman Rosenthal, the former Exhibitions Secretary of London’s Royal Academy of Arts, in close collaboration with Suzanne Pagé, Artistic Director of Fondation Louis Vuitton, and her team brought together works in a variety of media including oil and acrylic painting, ink, pencil and charcoal drawing, digital art (iPhone, iPad, and computer drawings), immersive video installation and photographic drawing. Spanning seven decades of ground-breaking creativity, David Hockney 25 highlighted not only Hockney’s iconic early works but also places a special focus on the past 25 years, the early part of the 21st century, which has inspired the event's title.  

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While the world came in the Spring of 2020, Hockney produced over a hundred images on his iPad within just a few weeks. Working digitally lets him capture the essence of each scene quickly and precisely. Much like the Impressionists, Hockney skilfully records changes in light and weather, but uses a vivid, radiant palette. His compositions combine flat areas of bold colour with playful pop-like touches. 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.

The exhibition will include Hockney’s recent works: the celebrated Moon Room which reflects his lifelong interest in the cycle of light and time passing. It will also feature digital paintings from his Sunrise body of work.

A Year in Normandy, a ninety-metre-long frieze, inspired by the Bayeaux Tapestry, showing the change of seasons at the artist’s former studio in Normandy, will also feature in the show.

David Hockney is interested in how art and technology can come together in new ways. Recommending that people slow down and notice the beauty of the world around them, he believes that simple, everyday beauty, like a sunrise, is worth celebrating.

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David Hockney (b. 1937 in Bradford, Yorkshire) has been at the forefront of the international art world for more than six decades. He emerged as one of the exceptional talents in the new generation of British artists in the early 1960s. Throughout his extraordinarily prolific career, he remains endlessly inventive and committed to celebrating the world around him. 

Hockney is fascinated by the language of representation in a variety of forms. He explores the conventions of Chinese and Japanese painting as well as the traditions of European art. He experimented with abstraction; however, he steadfastly remains a figurative artist. Constantly questioning the world around him, he draws and paints from life, from memory, and from imagination. 

Across his career he has created many bodies of works and numerous individual paintings which are now viewed as iconic. His experimental paintings in the early sixties announced the arrival of a new artistic voice. These were followed by a celebrated series of Hollywood swimming pools where the young Hockney arrived in 1964, documenting the city’s seductive charm and ambience from the position of an outsider. Often poetically titled, works such as A Bigger Splash and Beverly Hills Housewife have become celebrated paintings and part of the modern vernacular. 

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credit photos :A Year in Normandie (detail), 2020-2021, composite iPad painting © David Hockney /David Hockney, London, 2023 © David Hockney Photo Credit: Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima