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The Bayeux Tapestry Museum hosts a unique exhibition presenting face-to-face reproductions of the famous work of the Middle Ages and British painter David Hockney’s giant fresco “A Year in Normandy”. On view until April 23, 2023.
A masterpiece of the Middle Ages in front of a giant fresco created by a major figure in contemporary art. Two works that face each other in an unprecedented exhibition called A year in Normandy and presented at the Bayeux Tapestry Museum until spring. Installed in Calvados since 2019, 85-year-old David Hockney created this 90m-long fresco of the four seasons in Normandy using a graphics tablet. Presented at the beginning of the year at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, the work can be seen from a new angle in Bayeux.
David Hockney, fascinated for many years by the Bayeux Tapestry, drew inspiration from its narrative mode for his fresco, an unprecedented encounter between the Normandy countryside and the story of William the Conqueror’s conquest of England in the 11th century.
For this exhibition, the bias is to present to the public reproductions on the same scale of the two works, for a wander between two worlds, a thousand years apart. “Unlike an ordinary framed painting that is just a window to instantaneity, these two works are discovered in movement. There is the movement of the gaze and that of the body”, explains Antoine Vernay, Conservatory of the Museum of Bayeux.
Installed in the Pays d’Auge since 2019, David Hockney took advantage of the successive confinements to create this unique work. According to the seasons, he represented the Norman skies in the manner of the Impressionists, but with a 21st century tool, the graphic palette. A monumental fresco that today finds a particular echo in front of a great work of art history.
A Year in Normandy – David Hockneyuntil April 23, 2023, Bayeux Tapestry Museum, 13b rue de Nesmond, 14400 Bayeux – 02 31 51 25 50 – Open every day – Visit included in the museum visit.