David Hockney

Arguably Britain’s greatest contemporary artist and a key contributor to the Pop Art movement, David Hockney’s great skill as a colourist was matched by an artistic brilliance that broke rules and pushed boundaries. Seamlessly moving between different mediums, including painting, printmaking, photography, video and, more recently, digital media, his iPad drawings revealed an artist intent on exploring the possibilities of image-making, despite having been in his 80s.

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, with one of his best-known paintings the canvas A Bigger Splash (1967).

His continuing 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, using bright pop colours to depict the world around him, in 2018 he relocated to Normandy after 35 years in California, finding new inspiration in the dramatic seasonal variations of the French countryside.

As one of Britain’s top-selling British artists and a fan favourite across the world, Hockney’s joyous artworks has continued to inspire generations of artists. With more than 350 solo shows and the third-largest auction marketplace among the founders of Pop Art, in 2018 he achieved an auction record when Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold at Christie’s New York for $90.3 million.