Overview
- David Hockney died in London at the age of 88, and news coverage is focused on his life, work and cultural legacy.
- He rose to fame in the 1960s as a leading figure of British pop art, best known for luminous pool paintings such as A Bigger Splash that altered color and perspective in figurative painting.
- Across a seven-decade career Hockney repeatedly reinvented his practice, moving from academic painting to Polaroid and montage photography and later to iPad drawings that were shown in major museum exhibitions.
- His market and institutional profile was substantial with a 2018 auction high of $90.3 million for Portrait of an Artist (Pool with two figures) and a large 2025 retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton.
- Born in Bradford in 1937, he trained at the Royal College of Art, served as a conscientious-objector nurse, became progressively deaf from midlife and lived in Normandy before returning to London in 2023.