David Hockney: a 90-metre vision that often looks better on your phone

David Hockney reassured postwar Britain that it was acceptable to take pleasure in beauty and freedom. Emerging in the late 1950s, his celebration of conventional forms revitalised modern painting, offering direct, accessible work that resisted the era’s prevailing academicism and irony.

At the Serpentine North the centrepiece is a 90-metre frieze, A Year in Normandie, wrapped round the gallery like a ribbon. Made from about 100 separate iPad images collaged and printed as a single strip, it is theatrically lit against a dark-blue wall so that it glows like a screen; presented this way, the frieze will reproduce well on phone screens, which is perhaps fortunate, because in the room it is underwhelming.

Hockney’s aim here is to challenge single-point perspective, assembling a “many-windowed” view from multiple moments in space and time.

Britain

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