The Sakıp Sabancı Museum, in collaboration with Akbank, will host The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020 by David Hockney, who is one of the most inspiring artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. The Sakıp Sabancı Museum in Istanbul will be the third museum venue for the exhibition, which was previously shown at the Royal Academy in London and Bozar in Brussels.

Hockney, who has been experimenting with new technologies and different methods of making art throughout his career, began to draw on an iPhone and iPad in the early 2000s. This exhibition, a culmination of this particular technological quest, includes 116 of the artist's iPad paintings, the sub- ject of which heralds the arrival of spring. These were all executed in Normandy in 2020, during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In these ‘paintings’, Hockney depicts a landscape filled with fruit trees, bushes, flower beds, ponds and rivers, fields, and distant hills, capturing the annual cycle of spring from bare trees to buds, flowers, and abundant green foliage. The exhibition celebrates the season from beginning to end, reminding us of the miracles of the natural world and its constant renewal.

The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020 will be at the Sakıp Sabancı Museum between 11 May – 29 July, with the support of Akbank.

The Multi-Entry Tickets which are currently on sale, will also be valid for visits to The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020.

For your requests regarding the images in the bulletin, please email us at pr.ssm@sabanciuniv.edu