ArtistBritish
David Hockney
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David Hockney grew up in Bradford, West Riding of Yorkshire, the fourth of five children, in a working-class family with strong ethical convictions. He showed artistic ability early and went on to study at Bradford College of Art before winning a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in London, where he graduated in 1962 with the Gold Medal. At the RCA he encountered R. B. Kitaj and became part of the wave of young British artists whose work was shown in the New Contemporaries exhibition alongside Peter Blake, announcing the arrival of British Pop art.
Hockney's earliest mature prints, including A Rake's Progress (1961-63), already showed his command of etching and his gift for narrative. His first visit to New York had sparked the series, which reworked Hogarth's morality tale as a semi-autobiographical account of a young gay man finding his footing in a new world. The candour he brought to questions of identity and desire was unusual for the time and ran through his work from then on.
In 1964 he moved to Los Angeles, and the shift in light, landscape, and culture transformed his painting. The California swimming pool became one of the most durable images in postwar art: A Bigger Splash (1967) and Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972) capture both the seductiveness and the slight unreality of Southern California life. In 2018 the latter sold at Christie's for $90 million, at the time the highest price ever achieved for a work by a living artist. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s he also returned regularly to portraiture, producing intimate double portraits of friends and large-scale domestic paintings such as My Parents (1977), now in the Tate collection.
Hockney has never settled into a single medium or style. He explored photographic collages he called "joiners" in the 1980s, experimented with fax machines and laser prints, and in the 2000s embraced digital tools with the same energy he had brought to printmaking. His iPad drawings of the East Yorkshire landscape, created from 2011, were shown at the Royal Academy in the exhibition A Bigger Picture (2012) and established a new chapter in the history of digital art. A group of 17 iPad works from the Arrival of Spring in Woldgate series sold at Sotheby's London in October 2025 for 6.2 million GBP.
His awards include the Companion of Honour (1997) and the Order of Merit (2012), the latter being one of only 24 appointments the British monarch can make. On Auctionist, Hockney appears across 14 listings from auction houses including Phillips, Stockholms Auktionsverk, and Lawrences Auctioneers. Works range from major signed prints - The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate sold for 206,400 GBP at Phillips in January 2026 - to smaller editions and multiples, reflecting the breadth of his printmaking output.