David Hockney, the British artist whose vibrant paintings of swimming pools, landscapes, portraits, and domestic life made him one of the most influential figures in contemporary art, has died at the age of 88. According to the artist’s representatives, Hockney passed away peacefully at home.
Over a career spanning more than six decades, Hockney continually reinvented both his subject matter and his methods while remaining committed to the act of looking. From the sun-drenched swimming pools of Los Angeles that helped define his international reputation in the 1960s and ’70s to his expansive Yorkshire landscapes and later iPad drawings, he combined technical experimentation with a bright, deeply personal visual language.
Born in Bradford, England, in 1937, Hockney studied at the Royal College of Art in London and emerged as one of the leading voices of postwar British art. His early work explored themes of identity, desire, and everyday life at a time when homosexuality was still criminalized in Britain. Later works, including A Bigger Splash (1967) and Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972), became defining images of 20th-century art.
Hockney’s artistic influence extended far beyond painting. He was an accomplished draftsman, printmaker, photographer, stage designer, and theorist of image-making. His experiments with photographic collage in the 1980s superimposed photographs together to play with perspective. Later, he embraced digital technologies, showing a willingness to evolve that is rare for painters of his stature. In 2010, Hockney began drawing on iPads, producing ambitious digital landscapes and portraits. “It’s just a medium,” he said in an interview at the Louisiana Museum. “But I am aware of the revolutionary aspects of it, and its implications.” In later years, he used this medium to depict his home region of Yorkshire, which he returned to in the 2000s, and Normandy, where he moved in 2019.
Hockney also became one of the most commercially successful artists of his generation. Demand for his work surged in the decades before his death, driven by both institutional recognition and a growing global collector base. In 2018, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972) sold at Christie’s for $90.3 million, briefly making Hockney the most expensive living artist at auction. While that record was later surpassed, his market remained among the strongest in contemporary art, with paintings, drawings, and editions regularly commanding significant prices across both the primary and secondary markets.
In recent years, Hockney remained remarkably active. Major exhibitions at institutions including the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris and the Serpentine in London reaffirmed his status as one of the most celebrated living artists. Future shows at Tate Britain, London, and the Munch Museum, Oslo, among others, are also in development.
Even in his late eighties, he continued to produce new work and advocate for the enduring power of figurative painting.
