David Hockney (1937–2026) was an English painter, draughtsman, photographer, and stage designer active in 20th and 21st century contemporary art. Born in Bradford, Yorkshire in 1937, the artist was associated with the Pop Art movement of the 1960s and throughout his career produced paintings, photographic collages, stage designs, and digital drawings. Hockney died at the age of 88 in his home in London on 12 June 2026.

David Hockney was born on 9 July 1937 in Bradford, Yorkshire as the fourth of five children of Kenneth and Laura Hockney. His father Kenneth was a conscientious objector who took a stance against social injustice and nuclear armament; his mother Laura was Christian. During the Second World War, the family’s neighborhood was damaged in a 1940 explosion, and it is noted that they supported Hockney’s artistic activities.

Due to paper shortages during the war, Hockney drew on kitchen floors and church books and studied the works of Picasso, Matisse and Fragonard.

At the age of 16, Hockney was accepted into the Bradford School of Art on a scholarship. Between 1953 and 1957 he studied under Norman Stevens, David Oxtoby and John Loker. During this period he continued working at his easel and famously wrote during an exam: “I am not good at science but I can draw.” One of his instructors noted in a report: “His enthusiasm for art alone is not sufficient to guarantee a career.”

Hockney was admitted to the Royal College of Art in 1959 and worked alongside R.B. Kitaj, Derek Boshier, Allen Jones, Peter Phillips and Patrick Caulfield. He graduated in 1962 with a gold medal. He fulfilled his military service as a hospital orderly on grounds of conscientious objection.

As a student he visited the Picasso exhibition at Tate London. He took the advice of his classmate R.B. Kitaj to depict subjects he felt personally drawn to. In 1963 Hockney held his first solo exhibition at the John Kasmin Gallery and later that year traveled to New York where he met Andy Warhol, Dennis Hopper and Metropolitan Museum curator Henry Geldzahler.

During a time when homosexuality was illegal in Britain, Hockney expressed his homosexual identity through his art. While at the Royal College of Art he painted a portrait of himself alongside American poet Walt Whitman.

Upon returning to London he launched an anti-censorship campaign after customs officials confiscated magazines from them. Home Secretary James Callaghan intervened in this process. In 1988 he canceled his retrospective exhibition at Tate Gallery to protest against a proposed anti-homosexuality bill in the British Parliament.

Hockney’s works depicting American daily life began with a visit to Los Angeles in the winter of 1964. During this period he abandoned oil paint in favor of acrylics and began painting the architecture around him.

Between 1964 and 1971 he produced a series of swimming pool paintings that captured American lifestyle. In these works he employed different brush techniques with acrylic paint to convey the reflection and movement of water.

In 1965 he taught at the University of Colorado and in 1966 at UCLA where he met his student Peter Schlesinger, who would later appear as a figure in his paintings. In the same year he completed his work Beverly Hills Housewife, depicting Betty Freeman. In 1967 while teaching in Berkeley he completed the painting A Bigger Splash.

This acrylic painting on canvas measuring 243 x 244 cm depicts a California house in the background and a splash of water created by a diver jumping from a diving board in the foreground. Hockney did not include a human figure directly in this work. The artist remarked: “The splash lasts two seconds but painting it took me two weeks.” The painting is part of the Tate Britain collection.

In November 2018 this painting sold for $90.3 million at Christie’s auction in New York, setting a record for the highest price paid at auction for a work by a living artist at that time. The painting shows a figure standing by the pool looking at another figure in the water. The figure outside the pool depicts Peter Schlesinger. The painting’s initial sale price in 1972 was $20,000. Hockney completed the work after two weeks of work and delivered it to the exhibition.

Following a visit to Los Angeles in 1997, Hockney began creating landscape paintings in a Fauvist style and turned his focus to the Yorkshire countryside. His work A Closer Grand Canyon (1998) consists of 60 canvases of equal size, completed in his studio based solely on direct sketches without photographic reference. Bigger Trees Near Warter (2007) is a large-scale work composed of 50 canvases. This painting, depicting a region in Yorkshire, was completed in six weeks and donated to Tate Modern in London.

In 1982 Hockney began producing multi-panel photomontages using Polaroid photographs in Los Angeles and opened the exhibition Drawing With A Camera, comprising 150 works, in New York. In these works photographs taken from different angles, distances and lighting conditions were combined to explore perspective and spatial relationships; this method has been associated with the approach of Cubist artists.

In 1986 Hockney began using the Paintbox digital system and created digital drawings under video recording as part of the BBC program Painting with Light. In the same year he incorporated color printers and handmade print outputs; in 1990 he added fax machines and laser printers to his creative process.

Hockney began using an iPhone in 2009 and an iPad in 2010. In 2010 he exhibited his digital works on iPad screens at the Paris exhibition David Hockney: Fleurs Fraîches. In a 2011 UK poll Hockney was named among the most influential artists and his iPad drawings appeared three times on the cover of New Yorker magazine.

^{The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020} (Anadolu Ajansı)

During the pandemic, the artist produced 116 paintings on his iPad while at his home in Normandy and presented them in the exhibition The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020. Curator Edith Devaney linked Hockney’s preference for the iPad to the ability to layer colors without the need for canvas preparation or paint drying time. This exhibition opened at Sakıp Sabancı Müzesi on 11 May 2022.

^Synesthesia (Anadolu Ajansı)

One of the biographical features of Hockney is his experience of synesthesia. Neurologist Richard E. Cytowic noted that Hockney became aware of this condition after beginning to design opera sets. Cytowic cited Hockney alongside Vladimir Nabokov and Wassily Kandinsky as examples of synesthetic artists, suggesting a link between this condition and metaphorical use in creative fields. Synesthesia is a neurological condition in which a sound, letter or number is perceived as a color.

From 1990 onward Hockney created stage and set designs for operas, which led him toward semi-abstract painting. Among the productions he designed are Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (1978) and Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten (1992) at the Royal Opera House.

Hockney participated in campaigns criticizing Margaret Thatcher’s government for its anti-homosexuality policies. In 1990 he declined a knighthood offered to him but accepted the Order of Merit in 1997, which he regarded as a personal honor bestowed by Queen Elizabeth II. During the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, Hockney lost friends from his circle and painted portraits of them during this period.

Hockney spent his final years in Normandy, France, continuing to produce landscape paintings and iPad works. In 2023 a cinematic experience in London projected his paintings, photographs and opera scenes onto walls 11 meters high. During this period the artist painted portraits of various individuals including singer Harry Styles. David Hockney died in his home in London on 12 June 2026.