David Hockney, a master of contemporary art and one of Britain's most beloved painters, passed away at his home in London on Friday, the artist's spokesperson announced Saturday.
In a statement, spokesperson Erica Bolton said, "David Hockney, one of the most important figures in 20th and 21st century contemporary art, passed away peacefully at his home on the 11th, a month before his 89th birthday." He was 88.
Hockney was born on July 9, 1937, in the gray industrial city of Bradford, Yorkshire, England. After enrolling at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in 1959, he challenged the school's policy that no diploma could be awarded without submitting an essay, arguing that he should be evaluated only by his work, and submitted "Life Painting for a Diploma." The school famously ended up changing its rules to award him the diploma.
Hockney was an artist who constantly raised questions about the way we see the world. He rejected conventional single-vanishing-point perspective and established his own style, distinct even from Cubism. Moving freely between figures, still lifes, and landscapes, and exploring diverse media from painting to photography, he became a painter whose name itself became a genre.
Leading the revival of British Pop Art in the 1960s, he also directly confronted the conventions of British society at a time when homosexuality was illegal. After moving to Los Angeles in 1964, he created his signature work "A Bigger Splash," which captured the fleeting moment of a splash and a blue swimming pool under intense sunlight. Even past the age of 70, he became the first artist to work using an iPad.
His 1972 work "Portrait of an Artist" sold for $90.3 million at a Christie's auction in New York in 2018, setting a record at the time for the highest auction price for a living artist. He was an artist who earned both art-historical acclaim and popular appeal. A large-scale David Hockney retrospective held at the Seoul Museum of Art in 2019 drew more than 300,000 visitors over four months, generating considerable buzz.
In his later years, he lived in Normandy, France, painting nature, and during the pandemic he completed a 95-meter masterpiece, demonstrating an unstoppable spirit of experimentation.
