Hockney, David

Born in Bradford in 1937, David Hockney attended the Bradford School of Art before entering the Royal College of Art, where he remained between 1959 and 1962. His classmates included Allen Jones and R. B. Kitaj. Hockney’s celebrity came while he was still a student, when his work was included in the Young Contemporaries exhibition, which marked the rise of British pop art. He visited Los Angeles in the early 1960s and settled there soon after. He is often associated with Southern California and the many works he produced there over several decades. From 2004 Hockney spent several years in Bridlington, capturing the Yorkshire landscape in oil and watercolor, as well as on film and on his iPad; this new engagement with landscape culminated in the exhibition A Bigger Picture that was shown at the Royal Academy of Arts in 2012, and after traveled to the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum. Following this, Hockney moved back to Los Angeles, where he returned to the intimacy of portraiture, a genre that has played a major role in his long career and which continues to fascinate him.

In the summer of 2013 he painted the first of what to become a large body of portraits, eventually numbering over 90; 82 can be seen in the exhibition together with one still-life.