David Hockney:A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting At: Serpentine North Gallery Location: West Carriage Drive, Kensington Gardens, W2 2AR [map] Open: 10am-6pm (Monday from noon, weekends until 7pm) From: 12 March to 23 August Admission: free Exhibition guide:guides.bloombergconnects.org Four word summary: seasonal iPaddery and tablecloths Time to allow: 30 mins
A David Hockney exhibition is usually quite an event; a big venue, fully ticketed, long lines. This is a medium event in a small venue, partially ticketed and I walked straight in.
It's at Serpentine North, a former gunpowder magazine in the heart of Hyde Park. This is the 2013 adjunct to the original gallery on the south bank of the Serpentine, just across the bridge, and if you've never been your cultural credentials are lacking. Picture a squat square building with hanging space around all four outer walls and two central rectangular galleries. For the Hockney show the perimeter has the trees and the thin centre has the tablecloths.
I wasn't going to go because the website said 'sold out'. Unsurprisingly when you offer free Hockney tickets to the masses they leap in and grab the lot, whether they genuinely want to turn up on a Thursday morning or not. But the smallprint said 'sold out' merely meant all the pre-booked tickets had gone, and that "Walk-ups are welcome but you may need to queue". It also said "The average queue time is currently 10 minutes", which didn't sound too terrible a price to pay. So I gave it a try and found no queue whatsoever, just a smiling member of staff gesturing me into the darkish interior. Tickets for June–August are being released at a later date if you prefer certainty of access.
A Year in Normandie is Hockney's response to moving into rural studios near Caen in 2019. When the pandemic struck he headed outside and painted the landscape around him, or at least dabbed creatively on his iPad, then shared these works with an appreciative global audience. As the title suggests he kept up his visual documentation for a year, right round to Spring again, and ended up with a portfolio of over 100 seasonal works. Around half have been selected to create an extended mural encircling the gallery, here on its first visit to the capital, as a panoply of French trees burst out into leafy splendour and then let it all drop again.
We start in foggy grey, branches bare, and as time passes the sky clears and the first green shoots appear. Hockney does a lot with blobs and splotches, for example a splatter of white and pink as spring blossom or a burst of yellow circles representing meadow flowers. Blossom season seems to go on for longer than you'd expect, proportionally speaking, but it is the most evocative of times so no complaints. Eventually all the trees are plain green confirming summer's here, this before rolls of golden hay appear and the descent into autumn begins. The first brown leaves appear on the bend into the final wall, and within a few frames they're tumbling and gone as a carpet of snow descends instead.
Superficially it has the flavour of a child's picture book on the seasons but is plainly more intricate than that. Skies change, motifs reappear, and could that possibly be the same tree as before but in different leafy guise? A rippling river flows through just one short subset of the autumnscape, a long grey cloud dominates a snatch of summer and one particular meadow appears as the backdrop for an entire month in spring. It all confirms an underlying structure deeper than simply a conveyor belt of trees, and you certainly get a good sense of David's rural environs in Beuvron-en-Auge.
David says one of his inspirations was the Bayeux Tapestry, another Normandy construct telling a lengthy tale in panoramic panels. He was more directly influenced by Chinese scroll paintings, 14th century landscapes illustrated on a continuous roll of paper or silk. These never ever depicted shadows, focusing instead on the permanent and physical, and this artistic foible allows Hockney to keep his grassy surfaces simple.
I confess to being less taken by the ten still lifes in the central galleries, these much more recently completed, and each for some conceptual reason featuring a gingham tablecloth. The perspective of each table is also 'wrong', all forward slanting and unnatural, but that's an accomplished artist doing what he likes and playing with the viewer. I was soon back walking the perimeter again, trying to mentally assign a month to each short strip of paintings (that's April cherry, that's a June storm, that's August hay and that must be November leaffall). In the end I found it so evocative I walked round three times, then exited through the obligatory giftshop and suspected they're going to do a roaring trade on books, cushions, coasters, postcards, trays and teatowels.
One of Hockney's Normandy paintings has been blown up to excessive proportions and is exhibited as a mural round the back of the restaurant across a flowerbed. I admired it more after a member of kitchen staff had finished his cigarette and moved out of the way. But the finest work out back was a nearby fruit tree bursting with frothy white blossom, bumblebee included, also a horse chestnut whose branches were tipped with sappy balls of green which within a fortnight will be a proper blanket of leaves. Beautiful stuff, and no tickets or walk-up queues required. Appreciate the seasons indoors sure, but don't forget to appreciate the real thing outside too at this pivotal time of greatest change.
