Dawn. A blue sky shot with red. Silhouettes of sleeping shrubs. A single bird traverses the full width of the horizon. A child-like sun, wobbly arms for rays, rises in the distance. Higher the sun rises, a second corona of wobbly rays appear. Higher and whiter the disc rises, until a third corona of longer fingers extend out towards the viewer, licking the foreground. A fourth spiral of yellow rays now fills the thin band of the horizontal composition, on the cusp of enveloping the entire scene. Thicker, heavier lines appear, ray upon ray. The scene fades to vivid, bright saturated yellow. The yellow of cartoon lemons and street lamps. The work’s title is etched in shaky letters across this final backdrop: Remember you cannot look at the sun or death for very long.

David Hockney’s new work for CIRCA will play for the month of May across the world on giant screens in London, Seoul, Tokyo, Los Angeles and New York. Spanning the full circumference of the globe, Hockney’s animated dawn will follow real dawn thirty-one times. Screened in the evenings, viewers will see the sun rise once again, not long after it dipped below the horizon. Coinciding in London with the opening of the Royal Academy’s new exhibition, David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020, the project further marks a moment of renewal for the country’s battered museums and the city’s dormant but fast rousing arts scene.