David Hockney
David Hockney (b.1937) is a British painter who is known for his revolutionized style of painting called ‘British Pop Art’. His artistic pursuits stretch across a vast range of media,...
David Hockney (b.1937) is a British painter who is known for his revolutionized style of painting called ‘British Pop Art’. His artistic pursuits stretch across a vast range of media, from photographic collages, and full-scale opera stagings, to 21st-century technology-based work. Hockney gained notoriety with his semi-abstract paintings on the theme of homosexual love. In the painting We Two Boys Clinging Together, red-painted couples are shown embracing while floating amidst fragments from a Walt Whitman poem. After moving to California in 1963, Hockney began painting scenes of California life. Athletic men, swimming pools, palm trees, and sunshine were common in his work at this time. In the 1970s, Hockney began to experiment with photography and soon became famous for challenging the two-dimensionality of photography with his Polaroid grid photograph collages. His first solo show was in 1963 at the age of 26, and in 1970 the first of several major retrospectives was organized at Whitechapel Gallery, London. Hockney’s works reside in museums around the world such as the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. Hockney had a recent retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on display from 2017-2018.