David Hockney

Born in 1937, David Hockney is an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer. An important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century. As a pioneer of the British Pop Art movement in the early 60s alongside Richard Hamilton, David Hockney gained recognition for his semi-abstract paintings on the theme of homosexual love before it was decriminalized in England in 1967.

After moving to California at the end of 1963, Hockney began painting scenes of the sensual and uninhibited life of athletic young men, depicting swimming pools, palm trees, and perpetual sunshine. In 1965 he worked on a suite of prints called 'A Hollywood Collection',' The Weather Series', produced in 1972, was the second major suite of prints he produced and is in part is inspired by the representation of weather in Japanese prints. Here, however, Hockney returns to a favourite theme of still life with plants or flowers for this image of a potted plant on a sunny table.

Experimenting with photography in the mid-1970s, Hockney went on to create his famous photo-collages with Polaroids and snapshot prints arranged in a grid formation, pushing the two-dimensionality of photography to the limit, fragmenting the monocular vision of the camera and activating the viewer in the process. A versatile artist, Hockney has produced work in almost every medium-including full-scale opera set designs, prints, and drawings using cutting-edge technology such as fax machines, laser photocopiers, computers, and even iPhones and iPads.

Now in his late 80s, he still works actively within the artworld. His most recent project has embraced digital technology on a much larger scale to create "Bigger & Closer (Not Smaller and Further Away)". Three years in the making, this is an immersive spectacular, where the viewer is engulfed and surrounded by dozens of Hockney's paintings as they are beamed onto the surrounding walls in large scale; "The British artist has always embraced new ways of working. With an immersive digital extravaganza, he is taking it to the next level" (New York Times). 

He divides his time between Yorkshire, United Kingdom and Los Angeles, United States.