Salmestone Primary children among first to see David Hockney’s Sunley Window at Turner Contemporary

By Dan Thompson

Turner has unveiled its new commission, a huge window by national treasure David Hockney, with a group of isle schoolchildren being the first to see it.

The window fills the double-height space of Turner’s Sunley Gallery with a digital image of a countryside scene, at sunrise (the children, from Salmestone Primary, were unsure whether it was sunrise or sunset).

The digital sky will replace the real one to mark 15 years of Turner commissioning artists and bringing big names to Margate. Made from coloured vinyl, it acts like a stained glass window,. It will fill the gallery’s spaces with bold washes of colour, which will move and change as the sun and seasons shift.

Hockney is best known as a painter, but has also worked as a printmaker, stage designer, and photographer. From Bradford, he is perhaps best known for the paintings made after he moved to LA, including the swimming pool series.

The most famous of these is A Bigger Splash, which hangs in the permanent collection of the Tate Britain for £70 million, becoming the most expensive artwork by a living artist sold at auction.

In more recent years, he returned to the UK. Hockney’s largest painting, Bigger Trees Near Warter, measures 4.6 by 12.2 metres, and was hung in the Royal Academy’s largest gallery in its annual Summer Exhibition. It shows a coppice of trees near Warter, Yorkshire, and was painted in the open air.

Turner hopes the window – drawn by Hockney using an iPad – will encourage young people to have a go, so the visiting Salmestone pupils were all treated to an iPad drawing lesson while at the gallery.

The Hockney window can be viewed at Turner from 1 April–1 November 2026, and admission is free. 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 at Serpentine North in London from 12 March–23 August 2026.