FROM BAYEUX TO HOCKNEY: TWO TAPESTRIES, ALMOST 1,000 YEARS APART, COME TOGETHER IN CAMBRIDGE
As the Bayeux Tapestry returns to Britain for the first time in nearly a millennium, MODO brings the story into the present through David Hockney.
Almost 1,000 years separate the Bayeux Tapestry from David Hockney’s monumental A Year in Normandie. At MODO in Cambridge, visitors can now encounter the two side by side and see for themselves the connection between one of the world’s most famous medieval works and one of Hockney’s most ambitious digital creations.
The timing could hardly be more significant.
This September, the Bayeux Tapestry returns to Britain for the first time since it was made nearly 1,000 years ago, in an historic loan to the British Museum.
Meanwhile, in Cambridge, MODO is exploring a very different chapter in the Tapestry’s story: its influence on David Hockney.
Hockney created A Year in Normandie in 2020–21 while living in northern France. These iPad works follows the landscape surrounding his home through the changing seasons. Rather than presenting these observations as individual pictures, Hockney joined them together into one continuous panoramic image.
Its format was inspired by two very different traditions of picture-making: Chinese scroll painting and the Bayeux Tapestry.
At MODO, that connection becomes physical.
A reproduction of the Bayeux Tapestry is installed alongside a similarly scaled version of Hockney’s Normandy work, allowing visitors to move along the images rather than encounter them as conventional pictures on a wall.
Separated by centuries and radically different technologies, both works use a continuous image to carry the viewer through time.
The Bayeux Tapestry records conquest, conflict and political change. Hockney turns the same idea towards something entirely different: nature and the gradual arrival of spring, changing light, blossom, trees and the passing of the seasons.
It is an extraordinary example of something Hockney did throughout his career: looking backwards in order to move forwards.
In 2020, as one of the most technologically adventurous artists of his generation David Hockney was using an iPad to explore an idea that had existed for almost a thousand years.
The presentation also follows the Serpentine’s major 2026 exhibition David Hockney: A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting, which brought the full 90-metre A Year in Normandie to London for the first time.
At MODO, the focus is specifically on the relationship behind it.
For a gallery devoted exclusively to David Hockney, the installation is part of a wider approach to showing his work: placing individual works back into the ideas, influences and experiments from which they emerged.
Visitors do not need to know anything about Hockney before they arrive.
They simply need to walk alongside the two images.
Nearly a thousand years apart, the conversation between them is remarkably easy to see.
David Hockney and the Bayeux Tapestry are on view at MODO, Cambridge. It is a free exhibition, no need to book ahead.
MODO – The David Hockney Specialist Gallery
Cambridge
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