One of the most important artists to emerge in Britain in the 1960s, David Hockney first gained attention while he was a student at the Royal College of Art in London. Along with Allan Jones, RB Kitaj and other current and former RCA students, Hockney was featured in the 1961 edition of the annual Young Contemporaries exhibition, held at Whitechapel Art Gallery, which heralded the arrival of the new Pop aesthetic in the UK.
In 1964 Hockney moved to from London to Los Angeles, where he started painting scenes of Southern California life – rolling hills, swimming pools and modernist architecture – that were often infused with homoerotic themes. Hockney has also focused on the landscape, either in paintings or the collages made with Polaroid and 35 mm-color prints of the 1980s to mural-scaled horizontal format landscapes and stage sets. Hockney has continued to investigate the relationship between perception and space as well as technology, in a series of iPad drawings.
A major retrospective of his work organized by the Tate Britain, the Centre Pompidou and the Metropolitan Museum acknowledged the artist’s long career, which continues. Still active at age 80, the artist is represented in major collections around the world including notable holding by the British Museum, London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Hayward Gallery Arts Council Collection, London. For those collecting Hockney the market remains positive. According to Sotheby’s Mei Moses, the average compound annual return for Hockney resold at auction between 2003 and 2017 was 10.7% and 80.8% of 52 such works increased in value.