David Hockney

David Hockney (1937-2026) was arguably Britain’s greatest contemporary artist and a key contributor to the Pop Art movement, and he was a master colourist whose artistic brilliance broke rules and pushed boundaries. Seamlessly moving between different mediums, including painting, printmaking, photography, video and, more recently, digital media, his iPad drawings reflected a lifelong commitment to exploring the possibilities of image-making.

Born in 1937 in Yorkshire, England, to a working-class family, Hockney attended the Bradford School of Art before continuing his artistic education at London’s Royal College of Art. He first made his mark in the 1960s, when he relocated to Los Angeles. On a quest to document planes of saturated colour, he created a series of vibrant works featuring swimming pools, modernist homes and suburban Californian landscapes, including one of his best-known paintings, 'A Bigger Splash' (1967).

His enduring belief in the importance of portraiture resulted in more than 300 paintings of friends and lovers, including seminal pieces such as 'Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy' (1971) and 'American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman)' (1968). Often painting en plein air and using bright pop colours to depict the world around him, Hockney relocated to Normandy in 2018 after decades in California, finding new inspiration in the dramatic seasonal variations of the French countryside.

One of Britain’s most commercially successful and internationally celebrated artists, Hockney inspired generations through his joyful and instantly recognisable work. Across a career spanning more than six decades, he staged hundreds of solo exhibitions and became one of the most significant figures in the global art market. In 2018, 'Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)' sold at Christie’s New York for $90.3 million, then an auction record for a living artist. His influence on modern and contemporary art continues through an extraordinary body of work defined by colour, experimentation and an enduring curiosity about how we see the world.