I found David Hockney’s 80-metre iPad painting surprisingly moving

If you didn’t know that David Hockney was 88 years old, you might think he was in his prime, given the frequency of his shows. Less than a year after the opening of his colossal retrospective in Paris, a free solo exhibition at London’s Serpentine provides a magical, moving demonstration that his artistic powers haven’t deserted him in old age.

Ten new paintings appear within the two central rooms of this former gunpowder store in Kensington Gardens: five portraits and five still-lifes, all depicting gingham tablecloths and flanked by full-length mirrors. The former, which include likenesses of Hockney’s carer, in blue scrubs, as well as his partner, “JP”, who appears semi-distracted by his phone, are considerably more resolved and impactful than the shaky portraits he showed at Annely Juda Fine Art last autumn.

The main event, though, is a work of art that Hockney calls a “composite iPad painting”, which is on show in London for the first time. Inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry, as well as Chinese scroll paintings, and printed on paper, A Year in Normandie (2020-21) knits together images created on his tablet during the pandemic, when he was living in a 17th-century farmhouse in Normandy, with four acres of fields and orchards.

At Serpentine North, this 265ft-long frieze – which presents an otherworldly landscape charting the progress of the seasons – wraps around the internal faces of the square gallery’s outer walls, curving across corners.

There are within it a few nods to humankind: some garden furniture; a curiously anthropomorphic treehouse; the top of a car, semi-hidden beside a hay bale. Hockney’s half-timbered home, seen from various angles, recurs throughout, like an actor in a starring role.

Otherwise, though, the prevailing impression is of nature’s unhurried, inexorable rhythms, as we move from bare-branched trees, represented in midwinter, to the flaring blossom of spring, early summer’s great, shaggy greenery, the fallen, orange and yellow leaves of autumn, and back to winter – and white.

Here are the four seasons – but counter-intuitively, given the work’s emptiness, I was reminded of another venerable artistic subject: the Ages of Man. Because – and this is its enchantment – the frieze also functions as a metaphor for an individual’s long life, marked by moments of serenity and bliss, but also passages of hardship, difficulty, even grief. At points, Hockney portrays imposing fallen boughs, like spiky abstract sculptures, which have a funereal air. There’s rain as well as sunshine in this Normandie-Neverland.

I’ve never been totally sold on Hockney’s iPad art. In this case, too many of his marks (perfect circles denoting dandelions; odd, staccato dot-clusters conveying the immateriality of clouds) are obviously artificial. Off-putting in their inhuman uniformity, they jar with the natural subject matter (although Hockney’s palette, with its intense purples, is hardly naturalistic). Several transitions within the frieze are awkward and abrupt.

Yet, I was surprised by how spellbinding I found A Year in Normandie. It doesn’t reflect my memory of lockdown (our household was upended by a demanding one-year-old); it might not reflect yours. But it is, somehow, universal: a sort of quiet paradise that simultaneously implies life’s ups and downs. The effect is beautiful, transporting and – since Hockney’s art is often said to be simplistically carefree – unexpectedly emotional.

At Serpentine North until Aug 23; serpentinegalleries.org