David Hockney

David Hockney was one of the most influential British artists of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. Recognised as a pioneer of Pop art in the 1960s, he produced some of the most widely celebrated works of art over the last seven decades. Hockney’s endless pursuit of experimentation resulted in an oeuvre of diverse media encompassing painting, printmaking, photography, digital works and stage design.

Born on 9^th July 1937 in Bradford, Yorkshire, into what he described as a ‘radical working-class family,’ Hockney showed early artistic promise. After winning a scholarship to Bradford Grammar School in 1948, he enrolled at Bradford College of Art in 1953, graduating with a First-Class Diploma with Honours. There he developed the rigorous observational drawing skills and grounding in oil painting and printmaking that would underpin his lifelong practice. From 1959 to 1962 he studied at London’s Royal College of Art, participating in the influential Young Contemporaries exhibition of 1961, widely credited with bringing Pop art to prominence in Britain.

Hockney’s first solo exhibition, David Hockney: Pictures with People in, was held at Kasmin Gallery, London, in 1963. That same year he travelled to Los Angeles for the first time. Hockney was immediately captivated by its liberating lifestyle and culture and decided to move there in January 1964. California would become central to his work, most famously through his swimming pool paintings of the 1960s and 1970s, in which reflections, surface and perspective became a technical challenge. Hockney’s reputation grew rapidly and in 1970, at 33 years old, the Whitechapel Gallery in London held his first retrospective, David Hockney: Paintings, Prints and Drawings 1960-1970. The death of Picasso three years later marked a profound turning point in Hockney’s career. In 1973 he moved to Paris and began a fruitful collaboration with Aldo Crommelynck, Picasso’s master printmaker, producing several etchings in honour of the Spanish artist.

After fifteen years living between Europe and America, Hockney decided to settle again in Los Angeles in 1978. His experimental energy and eager pursuit of new techniques saw master printmaker Ken Tyler introduce him to a unique method of adding dye to wet paper pulp. In just 45 days, Hockney created 29 large and richly coloured works titled Paper Pools. Throughout the 1980s he continued to challenge conventions of representation, producing extensive photo collages and the Moving Focus series, which engaged directly with Cubist principles of multiple viewpoints. During this period, Hockney also embraced emerging technologies. In 1985 he used the Quantel Paintbox, signalling the start of a sustained engagement with digital media. The following year he produced his Home-Made Prints using a Xerox photocopier, seeking greater autonomy after years of working collaboratively in print studios.

From lithography and etching to radical digital experimentation, Hockney’s innovations have secured his place among the most respected printmakers of the last century. Alongside his studio practice, Hockney worked actively in stage design, collaborating in 1992 with Ian Falconer on the highly acclaimed set for Puccini’s Turandot at the Lyric Opera of Chicago.

By 2003, after four decades abroad, Hockney returned to Yorkshire, where the changing seasons and rhythms of nature inspired a renewed focus on painting en plein air. Adopting the traditional principles of painting, the arrival of the iPad marked a significant turning point in his career, bringing a degree of portability and versatility which enabled him to work outdoors in all conditions. In 2011 he embarked on The Arrival of Spring, a body of work that led to the Royal Academy of Art’s landmark exhibition David Hockney: A Bigger Picture (2012), featuring vast East Yorkshire landscapes alongside iPad drawings. Hockney’s 80^th birthday in 2017 was marked with a major retrospective at Tate Britain – one of the institution’s most visited exhibitions – before it travelled to the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Hockney relocated to the peaceful environs of Normandy, France, in 2019. Confined to his home during the Covid-19 lockdown, he worked prolifically during this period, creating over 100 iPad works capturing the subtle variations of light and climate over the course of a few weeks. This period culminated in the 2021 exhibition A Year in Normandie at the Musée de l’Orangerie, centred on a monumental iPad frieze of the same name.

In 2024, Halcyon brought together one of the world’s largest collections of Hockney’s graphics in David Hockney: Living in Colour, featuring more than 150 works which spanned six decades of his career. Following this, the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris presented a major retrospective in 2025. Including over 400 works from 1955 to 2025, this was Hockney’s largest exhibition to date. In 2026, the Serpentine North Gallery hosted a major solo show which brought Hockney’s 90-metre-long A Year in Normandie to London for the first time, coinciding with the loan of the Bayeux Tapestry to the British Museum.

On 11^th June 2026, David Hockney passed away at the age of 88. At the time of his death, he was globally recognised as a beloved and pioneering figure in British art and one of the most influential artists of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. In 2027, the Tate will present two major exhibitions in London celebrating seven decades of Hockney’s illustrious career and legacy.