The exhibition is set to open to the public in May 2021.
David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020 will present a new body of work from the artist, created at his home in Normandy.
Charting the progress of Spring and coinciding with he beginning of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, this will be the first time these works will be seen in public.
Hockney has been fascinated by conveying the passing of time through painting and the exhibition will present over a hundred works that have been ‘painted’ on an iPad. Presented chronologically, the works will be printed on paper at a large-scale and densely hung evoking a sense of emersion in nature across the three Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Galleries.
Inspired by Bayeux Tapestry’s graphic and narrative form, which is located near to his home in Normandy, this new body of work is comprised 116 works in total and is set to be displayed exactly a year after they were created.
Talking about the works he has created, David Hockney said: “I have been working this year, 2020, to depict the arrival of spring in Normandy. This takes about three months, and I think it’s the most exciting thing nature has to offer in this part of the world. When the lockdown came… we were in a house in the middle of a four-acre field full of fruit trees. I could concentrate on one thing, I did at least one drawing a day with the constant changes going on, all around the house. I kept drawing the winter trees, and then the small buds that became the blossom, and then the full blossom. Then the leaves started, and eventually the blossom fell off leaving a small fruit and leaves, this process took about two weeks, all the time I was getting better at my mark making on the screen, eventually doing, à la Monet, the water lilies in the pond.”
David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020 will be on display at the Royal Academy of Arts from the 23rd May until the 26th September 2021.