David Hockney Overview
Born in 1937, Hockey is considered one of the most influential British artists of the twentieth century, having made a career for himself as a painter, printmaker, photographer, stage designer and draughtsman. His work across such a wide range of media can be seen to be linked through their autobiographical subject matter; Hockney’s oeuvre is typically made up of self-portraits, or portraits of people, homes, and landscapes that have been known to him. Again, speaking to his interests in experimenting with new media, Hockney’s style is associated with the pop art movement, a style of art which derives from experiments in photography. It is in this style that Hockney created some of the most recognisable images of the movement, and of the twentieth century; his swimming pool motif being the leading example. His Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Figures) (1972) set the auction record for a living artist at the time when it sold for $90 million in 2018.
Hockney was educated in Britain, at the Bradford College of Art, then the Royal College of Art, London. Throughout his career, he has lived between London and California, with the ‘Californian modern’ aesthetic having a noticeable influence on his work in terms of the shapes and colours he would use. He had his first one-man show at the age of 26, and the first major retrospective of his work was hosted in London in 1970, before it spent time travelling around Europe. At Wilson55, our in-house expert Stephen Sparrow has years of experience in assessing and valuing David Hockney’s work, so do get in touch if you’d like to learn more about a piece you own or discuss a potential sale or valuation.
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