David Hockney and the Question of Time in Contemporary Painting

At a moment when images are made to vanish almost as quickly as they appear, David Hockney’s recent paintings ask what it means to stay with a scene long enough for time to leave its mark. Bringing together a sustained meditation on landscape with intimate still lifes and portraits, the work positions painting as a medium uniquely suited to recording continuity, repetition, and the quiet passage of days.

The exhibition arrives at a moment when slowness has become a contested value. Images circulate faster than ever, yet cultural institutions continue to ask what endurance looks like in art. Hockney’s answer is neither nostalgic nor defensive. Instead, it insists on continuity: that painting, for all its history, remains a way of thinking through change.

A Year in Normandie is a monumental frieze, unfolding across the cycle of spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Its subject is deceptively modest: trees, paths, sky, light. What gives the work its weight is duration. The panels accumulate, not as illustrations of nature but as records of sustained attention. Time here is not compressed into a single image but allowed to stretch, repeat, and drift. The work resists the dramatic in favour of the habitual, reminding viewers that change is often incremental rather than spectacular.

Seen now, several years after its making, the frieze reads differently than it did in reproduction. The scale insists on bodily engagement. Viewers move along it, mirroring the passage it depicts. This physical relationship to time feels pointed in a period when screens flatten experience into moments designed to be consumed quickly.

Alongside the frieze are new paintings: still lifes and portraits drawn from Hockney’s immediate circle. These works are quieter in scale but no less deliberate. Each is constructed frontally, with a gingham tablecloth recurring as a compositional anchor. The motif evokes domestic routine, but it also functions structurally, asserting the picture plane and reminding the viewer that representation is always a negotiation between depth and surface.

Hockney has long argued that all figurative painting is abstract, simply by virtue of existing on a flat support. In these recent works, that idea is not theoretical but visible. Objects and faces remain recognisable, yet colour, pattern, and spatial compression prevent any illusion of naturalism. The paintings hover between intimacy and distance, familiarity and formal restraint.

The portraits, in particular, suggest a different relationship to time than the monumental frieze. They are not records of duration but of presence. The sitters are people who occupy Hockney’s daily life, depicted without narrative framing or psychological overture. Their stillness carries a quiet gravity, implying care rather than performance. In an era of hyper-visible selfhood, these portraits resist spectacle.

The exhibition is presented at Serpentine, marking Hockney’s first major showing with the institution, at Serpentine North. That context matters. The Serpentine’s history has often been aligned with experimentation and the present tense. Hockney’s work, by contrast, brings with it an insistence on continuity and on the relevance of long artistic lives. At a time when novelty often dominates cultural discourse, this is a reminder that sustained practice remains a critical force.

Outside the gallery, a large-scale printed mural derived from the Normandie series extends the exhibition into the surrounding garden. The image depicts a tree house, a structure associated with play, observation, and retreat. Printed rather than painted, the work acknowledges Hockney’s longstanding engagement with digital tools without collapsing the distinction between medium and method. The digital here is not a replacement for painting but another way of thinking through it.

Hockney’s career has been marked by restless curiosity, from early explorations of perception to later experiments with photography and digital drawing. What unites these phases is not style but attention: to how we see, and to how seeing changes over time. The current body of work does not announce a new direction so much as it clarifies a long-standing commitment.

In revisiting painting’s capacity to hold time, Hockney positions the medium against cultural amnesia. These works do not argue for painting’s supremacy, nor do they retreat into tradition. Instead, they suggest that painting remains relevant precisely because it refuses speed. In doing so, they offer a counterpoint to a visual culture increasingly governed by immediacy.

What lingers after the exhibition is not a single image but a rhythm. The sense that time, when attended to patiently, can still be made visible. In Hockney’s hands, painting becomes less a statement than a practice: a way of staying with the world long enough for it to reveal itself.