David Hockney, giant of British contemporary art, dies aged 88

London Mayor Sadiq Khan called Hockney a “true icon and revolutionary of British art who never stopped reinventing his work.” Khan said in a statement that the artist had “inspired millions” and “helped me see the beauty and fragility of our natural world — and why it must be protected.”

The art historian Richard Morris said that Hockney’s “huge achievement was to make serious painting look effortless.” Morris wrote on X that “British art has lost a giant.”

Hockney was born in Bradford, in the northern English region of Yorkshire, in 1937. He trained at the Bradford School of Art and then the Royal College of Art in London, sparking a seven-decade career in which he “emerged as one of the seminal talents in the new generation of British artists,” the publicist said.

He began his career in abstract expressionism, but his work really took off when he moved to California in 1964 and switched styles, adopting a more figurative approach in which he captured real-world scenes albeit heavily stylized.

His work “A Bigger Splash” is one of several he made of swimming pools in the city. “It would become a defining image of sun-lit, clean-contoured southern California,” the London gallery Tate Modern says of the image.

Another of these works, 1972’s “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures),” was briefly the most expensive painting by a living artist sold at auction, going for $90 million at Christie’s in New York in 2018.

This record was beaten the next year when Jeff Koons’s “Rabbit” sold for $91 million at the same auction house.

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