David Hockney: A Printmaking Timeline

The most substantial recent development in Hockney’s printmaking comes with the Normandy works. Although the Normandy project is often discussed primarily in relation to painting and immersive installation, it is also central to Hockney’s late graphic thinking. The works are iPad paintings, but the exhibition history around them demonstrates their close relationship to reproducible, editionable image-making.

This is especially visible in the small-scale print projects of the same period. 220 for 2020 (Complete Set), for example, is a series of four iPad drawings in colours, printed as inkjet prints on archival paper in an edition of 100. By 2020, Hockney was operating at two related scales at once: monumental digital environments such as A Year in Normandie and smaller, explicitly editioned digital print sets such as 220 for 2020.

As of March 2026, Hockney has staged David Hockney: A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting at Serpentine North Gallery in London, indicating that the Normandy cycle continues to shape how his recent work is being framed publicly. Hockney’s late career remains organised around the same core question that has defined his printmaking for decades – how new technologies can alter, sharpen and disseminate ways of seeing.

Hockney’s lifelong artistic development has been mediated through presses, studios, publishers and printers. Bradford gave him lithography; the Royal College gave him etching; Editions Alecto gave him an early publishing structure; Petersburg Press provided continuity for his great etched portfolios; Gemini G.E.L. opened up the full possibilities of lithography and later hybrid printmaking; Tyler Graphics extended that collaborative field; and the digital era allowed him to rethink the print once again on his own terms.

Over the decades, Hockney’s media might have changed, but his underlying commitment did not: to make images that test both what we see, and how we see them.