Hockney, David (1937– )

English painter, printmaker, and designer, resident in California. One of the best-known figures in 20th-century British pop art, he developed a distinctive figurative style, as in his portrait Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1971; Tate Gallery, London). A Bigger Splash (1967) demonstrates his interest in bright flat blocks of colour and distinct line. He has experimented prolifically with technique, and produced drawings; etchings, including Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm (1970); photo collages; and opera sets for Glyndebourne, East Sussex; La Scala, Milan; and the Metropolitan, New York.

Born in Yorkshire, he studied at Bradford School of Art and then at the Royal College of Art, London, 1959–1962. He exhibited at the Young Contemporaries Show in 1961 and held his first solo exhibition in 1963, showing paintings that exploited pictorial ambiguities in a witty, self-consciously naive manner. In 1964 he went to California and many of his later paintings are concerned with Los Angeles life; his views of swimming pools reflect a preoccupation with surface pattern and effects of light. His drawings in pencil or pen and ink, many of them portraits of friends, are carried out with seemingly effortless ability. As well as illustrations to Grimm, in 1963 he produced a series of etchings updating Hogarth's The Rake's Progress. In 1975 he designed the sets and costumes for the Glyndebourne Festival Theatre production of Igor Stravinsky's opera The Rake's Progress. During the 1980s his work included some experiments with unconventional media, including prints created on a photocopier, but he still regarded painting as his main activity. In 1992 he began a series called Very New Paintings, depicting Californian scenery. In 1999 he was awarded the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition Award.

His books include Hockney by Hockney (1976), Travels With Pen, Pencil, and Ink (1978), Paper Pools (1980), David Hockney Photographs (1982), China Diary (1983), Hockney Paints the Stage (1983), and Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (2001). He was the subject of the semidocumentary film A Bigger Splash (1974).