This spring, David Hockney is painting with light itself. A 22-by-32-foot window installation arrives at Turner Contemporary in Margate, transforming the gallery's floor-to-ceiling glass overlooking the North Sea into a work of art. The piece depicts a Normandy sunrise—based on an iPad painting Hockney made in 2020—and when darkness falls, it becomes what the gallery's director calls "a point of light on the seafront."
It's a fitting gesture for a gallery that exists because of landscape painting. Turner Contemporary opened in 2011, named for JMW Turner, the 18th-century painter obsessed with light and weather. Hockney has long drawn from Turner's work—in 2007, he co-curated an exhibition of Turner's watercolors at Tate Britain. Now, at 87, he's in conversation with that legacy, using a Margate window as his canvas.
The installation runs from April 1 to November 1 as part of the gallery's 15th-anniversary celebrations, which means it'll catch the full arc of spring and summer light—the exact seasons Turner himself chased across the English coast.
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Start Your News DetoxA Year of Hockney
This is just the opening act. Next month, London's Serpentine Galleries opens Hockney's first solo show at the venue, running through August 23. The exhibition includes five new still lifes and five portraits of people close to him—family members, caregivers—alongside "A Year in Normandy," a 90-meter frieze he painted between 2020 and 2021. It's inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry, tracking seasonal shifts at his former studio in Normandy with the same obsessive attention to change that Turner gave to seascapes.
Hockney's reach continues to deepen. His 2017 Tate Britain retrospective drew nearly 478,000 visitors. Last year's exhibition at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris—the largest collection of his work ever assembled—proved the pull is global. What keeps audiences returning isn't novelty. It's recognition: these paintings ask us to look at the world the way Hockney does—as a problem of light, color, and the exact moment things shift.
With the Bayeux Tapestry heading to the British Museum later this year, and Hockney's own window-as-sunrise opening in Margate, the spring feels like a conversation across centuries about what it means to capture time and landscape on a surface. Hockney's still painting that conversation forward.
