MARGATE.- Celebrating the gallery’s 15th anniversary this spring, Turner Contemporary announced that David Hockney realised the next Sunley Window. Measuring seven by ten metres, Hockney’s work transforms the gallery’s iconic floor-to-ceiling window in the Sunley Gallery overlooking Margate’s beaches and the North Sea. It marks the first time a major work by the artist is exhibited in Margate.

Marking the beginning of spring, Hockney’s window depicts a sunrise in Normandy, where he produced an extraordinary body of work in response to the changing seasons, weather, and light. Originally made as an iPad painting, the window adapts a work he made in 2020 titled 27th April 2020, No. 1, which reflects his long-standing engagement with digital technologies.

Hockney’s Normandy paintings have been widely celebrated for their immediacy, optimism and close attention to the natural world. Spanning the Sunley Gallery’s window, the image creates a luminous threshold between gallery and shoreline bringing Hockney’s Normandy sunrise into dialogue with Margate’s coastal setting.

The work also resonates with Turner Contemporary’s founding inspiration. Hockney has frequently acknowledged his admiration for JMW Turner, particularly Turner’s radical treatment of light, atmosphere, and landscape. Installed on the site of the former boarding house where Turner stayed in Margate, Hockney’s sunrise aligns two artists through a sustained focus on light, the seasons, and the experience of looking.

‘Hockney’s sunrise, painted in Normandy in 2020, suggests renewal. Installed in the Sunley Window, it enters into a quiet but powerful dialogue with Margate’s own skies and sea. Illuminated at night, the work becomes a point of light on the seafront—one that encourages looking, long after the gallery doors have closed.’ Clarrie Wallis, Director, Turner Contemporary

The installation coincides with a major exhibition at Serpentine by David Hockney titled A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting. The exhibition is presented at Serpentine North in London from 12 March–23 August 2026. The Sunley Window offers audiences outside the capital a rare opportunity to encounter work by Hockney.

David Hockney became known as a central figure of British art in the 1960s and continues to be widely celebrated as one of the most influential artists of our time. Born in Bradford in 1937, he graduated from the Bradford School of Art in 1957 and studied at the Royal College of Art from 1959–62.

Alongside his prodigious painting and drawing practice, he has constantly explored new technological possibilities in making art. In the 1980s he embraced Polaroid film, photocopying and faxing and, more recently, digital media including photoshop and his iPad as new means of conceiving and creating mesmerising multiple-view and composite images. Now in his eighties, Hockney continues to create new works in all media with his unwavering desire to continually challenge conventions of perspective in art and how we truly ‘see’.