David Hockney Takes on the Bayeux Tapestry With a 300-Foot iPad Epic

Now nearing 90, David Hockney is not short on ambition. After all, it takes a certain kind of artist to see all 314 feet of that 11th-century epic, the Bayeux Tapestry, and rise to the challenge. The beloved British painter’s (2020–21) is a monumental tribute to the changing seasons. It has just made its London debut alongside a suite of new paintings.

Just shy of 300-feet and improbably painted using an iPad, Hockney’s frieze winds its way around the outer perimeter of “A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting,” on view at Serpentine North through August 23. These nonchalantly referenced “other thoughts,” however, are far from just afterthoughts. They comprise 10 new portraits and explorations of abstraction from 2025, a year that evidently saw Hockney busy hatching new experiments on the pictorial plane.

Take, for example, the five abstract compositions “resting” on a checkered tablecloth. These see Hockney imitate various styles of abstraction with most obvious reference to Mark Rothko and Gerhard Richter. In the case of the latter, who is invoked by squeegee-style smears, this could be read as a provocation. In 2015, Hockney dismissed the German heavyweight. “To be honest, I don’t really understand Richter,” he said, explaining that he just couldn’t “see the profundity.”

A decade later, perhaps Hockney is keeping an open mind. The titan of figurative art rejected pure abstraction as a student but kept the door open to a more coy, querying relationship. Abstraction has duly seeped into the interlocking planes of color with which Hockney builds worlds. Here, exceptionally, it takes center stage, which only serves to amplify its more subtle appearances.

Another five portraits are some of Hockney’s strongest from recent years, surpassing the expectations set by his 2023 exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. That had included a much-hyped, if not entirely convincing, likeness of pop star Harry Styles. In these works, however, close associates like partner Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, carer Thomas Mupfupi, and great-nephew Richard are more completely and sensitively rendered.

All 10 of Hockney’s new paintings are linked by the same framing motif: a table dressed in gingham cloth. This quintessentially Hockney-esque pattern—borrowed straight from his own wardrobe—has made frequent appearances in the artist’s more recent paintings. Here, its charming quaintness takes the lofty aims of conceptual art and plants them in the everyday, a whimsical move that is typical of Hockney’s humor.

The playful proposition also speaks to Hockney’s unpretentious belief that “art should be deep pleasure,” as he reaffirmed in a press statement. “I believe that my duty as an artist is to overcome and alleviate the sterility of despair,” he said. “New ways of seeing mean new ways of feeling.”

The eternal theme of time’s passing is indeed seen through fresh eyes in Hockney’s a work that uses new technologies to reimagine medieval narrative modes. As well as the Bayeux Tapestry, Hockney admires the magic of Chinese scroll paintings for their evocative power and non-Western approach to perspective. It was the lockdown of 2020 that brought the chance to slowdown and adopt a new approach to his surroundings.

In the absence of dramatic events, Hockney’s frieze sustains our interest as its trees blossom, dense green leaves turn orange and purple and then shed to reveal a skeletal silhouette. This is owed to the surprisingly rich degree of detail that the digital painting process has allowed, with gestural descriptors layered over the careful arrangement of repeat forms.

If Hockney baffled audiences in 2010 with this apparently gimmicky mode of art-making, he has since made a strong case for the medium’s range and expressive potential. Not least, the iPad has allowed the artist to work , bringing into the 21st century that same Impressionist impulse to capture one’s surroundings with a sense of their true immediacy. Fittingly, then, an outdoor mural at Serpentine North enlarges a segment of Hockney’s composition, allowing its meaning to change in relation to the ever-evolving elements that surround it.