David Hockney: Biography & Artwork

David
Hockney

One of Britain’s most beloved Pop artists, David Hockney is best known for his unforgettable, brightly coloured paintings and collages. Buy and sell original prints and editions by leading artist Hockney. We can value your print for free with zero obligation to sell and offer market advice on any work in Hockney's portfolio.

Biography

British-born David Hockney is a renowned painter and printmaker, best known for his bold, bright and experimental works. Hockney has experimented with a variety of mediums throughout his artistic career. Dabbling in the latest technologies, Hockney has delved into the realm of digital art, even utilising the Brushes application on his iPad to capture his celebrated landscapes.

In the 1980s Hockney launched into manufacturing photocollages. He discovered he could execute evocative pieces using the Polaroid shots he took and went on to create photography works such as My Mother, Bolton Abbey, 1982. Eventually, Hockney decided to return to painting after he found photography to be a limiting medium for his artistic scope.

Hailing from Bradford, Yorkshire, Hockney has explored a lifelong interest in different ‘ways of looking’ through his art, experimenting with a vast array of processes, media and styles in his long and illustrious career.

Swimming pools are a focal point of Hockney’s artistic oeuvre. Hockney’s series of paintings known as The Splash and A Bigger Splash were executed in 1966 and 1967 have proven to be iconic artworks in British Pop Art. These works perfectly capture and immortalise the ‘splash’ of an unseen swimmer entering a Californian swimming pool on a sunny day and mimick a snapshot from a camera.

Hockney continues with his lifelong muse, the swimming pool, in his celebrated 1972 Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), where the prospect of illustrating two figures in varying motions excited him. The painting portrays Hockney’s former lover, Peter Schlesinger, standing over a figure swimming towards him in the pool. The painting is now Hockney’s most expensive work ever sold, selling for US$90.3 million at Christie’s, New York.

Between January and April 2021, the Royal Academy of Arts organised The Bigger Picture exhibition, exhibiting 50 years' worth of his landscape paintings to the public.

Hockney’s first works were influenced by American Abstract Expressionism, and painters such as Jackson Pollock. In 1960, Hockney began to make his Love paintings, exhibiting them for two years in a row at the Young Contemporaries exhibition at London’s RBA Galleries.
The painting We Two Boys Together Clinging, which takes its inspiration from the American writer Walt Whitman’s poem of the same name, is perhaps the most famous of these works. A gestural, expressionistic depiction of two figures in an embrace, its use of graffiti-like script made coded references to Hockney’s sexuality at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain. These paintings birthed a style of their own and became emblematic of a British Pop Art scene and of the ‘swinging’, bohemian London of the ‘60s.
Throughout his life, Hockney has drawn from the works of canonical artists, such as High Renaissance painter Michelangelo, as well as from the work of more contemporary figures like Balthus or Giorgio Morandi.
As the Influences series shows, in the early portion of his career, Hockney was chiefly inspired by literature. Walt Whitman, for example, is a recurring point of reference in the artist’s early works, particularly the stand-out piece Myself And My Heroes (1961). Other names from the literary world, such as Anglo-American poet W.H. Auden, also informed Hockney’s early output during the ‘60s and ‘70s, as shown by the 1970 etching Auden.
No one has had a greater impact on Hockney’s œuvre, however, more than the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. Hockney once crafted two prints as tribute to his indebtedness to Picasso: The Student (1973) and Artist And Model (1973).
In 1964, Hockney made the bold move from a grey, overpriced London to California, where he set up his home and artist’s studio. Liking this migration to that of Van Gogh, who in 1888 travelled from Amsterdam to Arles, Southern France in order to profit from a better quality of light and a more readily available sun, it was a move that would directly influence not only his work, but the company he kept.
Spending more than thirty years in the United States, the Yorkshireman was catapulted into a new, sexually liberated space rich with a vibrant and graphic consumer culture that fascinated him. Punctuating his life with many trips abroad, Hockney formed close friendships with the likes of Lucian Freud, Andy Warhol, and Christopher Isherwood, amongst many others. In the 1990s, Hockney returned more frequently to Yorkshire to visit his ageing mother, before making a more permanent return to the UK in 1997. As of 2018, Hockney lives and works in Normandy, Northern France.

Between 1968-75, Hockney made a series of seven double portraits – one of them being the Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Henry Geldzahler and his then-boyfriend, painter Christopher Scott. When Henry Geldzahler And Christopher Scott came up for auction at Christie’s in London on 6 March 2019, it was one of just two double portraits remaining in private hands. The painting had previously been offered at Sotheby’s in New York in November 1992, where it realised US$1.1 million – 27 years later, its value in dollars was close to US$50 million.

Hockney had met Geldzahler at Andy Warhol’s ‘Factory’ in 1963. “Henry and I got on along instantly,” Hockney said later, recalling that they bonded over a love of opera, painting, Cuban cigars and that they shared the same birthday – 9 July.