"If you see the world as beautiful, thrilling and mysterious, as I think I do, then you feel quite alive.", David Hockney
David Hockney, OM, CH, RA (born July 9, 1937) is an English painter, draftsman, printmaker, photographer, and stage designer, widely regarded as one of the most influential British artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Born in Bradford, West Riding of Yorkshire, he was educated at Bradford College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London, where his appearance in the Young Contemporaries exhibition alongside Peter Blake helped announce the arrival of British Pop Art and where he was awarded the Royal College's gold medal in his graduating year. His move to Los Angeles in 1964 produced the body of swimming-pool, shower, and California-domestic paintings, among them A Bigger Splash (1967), for which he first became internationally famous.
He has worked across an unusually wide range of media, oil and acrylic painting, drawing, watercolor, etching, lithography, photographic collage, fax, paper pulp, computer software, and iPad drawing, and has continued to produce major bodies of work into his ninth decade. He declined a knighthood in 1990, was appointed a Companion of Honour in 1997, and accepted the Order of Merit from Queen Elizabeth II in 2012. His 1972 painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold at Christie's in November 2018 for $90.3 million, then a record price at auction for any living artist. His work is held in essentially every major collection of postwar art, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, the Centre Pompidou, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Royal Academy of Arts, and the Art Institute of Chicago, and a 2025 retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris brought together more than four hundred works across seven decades.