David Hockney died on 11 June 2026 at his home in London. He was 88 years old, one month short of his 89th birthday. No cause of death was given. He is survived by his long-time partner Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, his great-nephew and studio assistant Richard Hockney, and his brothers Philip and John.
From Bradford to Beverly Hills to Normandy, Hockney spent seven decades refusing to stay still, geographically, stylistically, or technically. He painted in oils and acrylics. He drew on iPhones and iPads. And, he made photographic collages, designed opera sets, and produced stained glass windows for Westminster Abbey. At the time of his death, a major exhibition of his work was running in London.
Bradford: Where it began
Hockney was born in Bradford, England, to Laura and Kenneth Hockney, the fourth of five children. His father was a conscientious objector in the Second World War. Hockney described his family as a “radical working-class family.”
He was educated at Wellington Primary School, Bradford Grammar School, Bradford School of Art from 1953 to 1958, and then the Royal College of Art in London from 1959 to 1962. At Bradford, he was already standing apart. He regularly attended extra evening life drawing classes. When the college tried to steer him toward commercial art, the standard route for art students at the time, he resisted.
As a conscientious objector like his father, he spent two years working in hospitals to fulfil his national service requirement. He arrived at the Royal College of Art in 1959 at age 22, older than most of his peers, and later said he was very eager to get back to proper work.
At the Royal College of Art, Hockney featured in the exhibition Young Contemporaries, alongside Peter Blake, that announced the arrival of British Pop art. He earned a gold medal in recognition of his achievements there. Even as a student, his works were being purchased for private collections.
When the RCA said it would not let him graduate in 1962 without a written essay, he refused to comply. He drew a sketch called ‘The Diploma’ in protest, arguing that an artist should be assessed solely on his artwork. The college relented.
California and the pool paintings
Hockney’s first solo show was held in 1963 at John Kasmin’s gallery in London. He visited New York for the first time in 1961 and became friends with Andy Warhol. He moved from London to Los Angeles in 1964, where he began documenting the city’s lifestyle from the position of an outsider.
California changed everything. The light was different. The architecture was different. The culture was different. After arriving in Los Angeles, he became renowned for his signature landscapes of sun-drenched swimming pools, blue skies and palm trees, all captured with luminous acrylic paint.
‘A Bigger Splash’ is a large pop art painting measuring 242.5 by 243.9 centimetres. It depicts a swimming pool beside a modern house, disturbed by a large splash of water created by an unseen figure who has apparently just jumped in from a diving board. It was painted in California between April and June 1967, when Hockney was teaching at the University of California, Berkeley.
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The pool series ran deeper than aesthetics. ‘Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)’, completed in 1972, was more autobiographical than it first appeared. The clothed figure standing by the pool was the sculptor and ceramicist Peter Schlesinger, whose relationship with Hockney had ended abruptly in 1971. The painting was personal, not decorative.
In 2018, ‘Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)’ sold for $90.3 million at Christie’s, a record at the time for a living artist. In February 2020, another pool painting, ‘The Splash’, sold at Sotheby’s for £23.1 million.
His subject matter frequently explored themes of romantic and sexual intimacy, often leading to large-scale double portraits such as ‘Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy’ (1968) and ‘Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy’ (1971). His early paintings challenged conservative attitudes, including works that portrayed queer desire and intimacy at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain. The law changed in 1967. Hockney had already been painting what he saw for years.
Portraits, perspectives and the question of seeing
Hockney was never only interested in swimming pools. He was interested in how human beings look at things, and how that differs from how a camera records them.
Art critics frequently described Hockney as a restless innovator. He experimented with photographic collages in the 1980s, later embraced fax machines and computer graphics, and became one of the first major artists to use iPhones and iPads as serious artistic tools.
In the 1980s he developed what he called “Joiners,” large composite photographs assembled from dozens of individual Polaroid or 35mm prints. The work was a deliberate argument against the single viewpoint of conventional photography. He believed the camera lied about how we actually see the world, which uses memory, time and movement. The Joiners attempted to restore that.
He also contributed costume and set designs for theatre, ballet, and opera. That includes a celebrated production of ‘Tristan und Isolde’ first staged in 1987 at the Los Angeles Opera.
Return to Yorkshire
In the early 2000s, Hockney returned to Yorkshire. He based himself in Bridlington and spent years painting the wolds, the lanes, the hawthorn hedges and the changing seasons. The scale of the work grew. His return to Yorkshire prompted a renewed engagement with the landscapes of his native country and produced some of his most ambitious oil paintings.
The iPhone and iPad became central to Hockney’s practice from 2007 onwards, resulting in the vast series ‘The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire’ in 2011. He had planned to paint outdoors at a plein air easel, but the Yorkshire winters made that impractical. He turned to his iPad instead, returning daily to the same spots in Woldgate to continue the series through spring.
The ‘Arrival of Spring’ series exhibited at the Royal Academy in 2012. It was part of the exhibition ‘A Bigger Picture’, which attracted over 600,000 visitors.
Normandy and the final years
After spending extended periods in Yorkshire and Los Angeles, Hockney settled in Normandy, France. ‘A Year in Normandie’ is a 90-metre long piece that Hockney produced on his iPad during the pandemic. Made up of 220 panels depicting the changing seasons in and around his French garden, it was inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry and Chinese scrolls.
In 2023, he painted Harry Styles at his Normandy studio, one of his last known portrait commissions.
At the time of his death, his exhibition at the Serpentine North gallery in London — which opened in March 2026 and was scheduled to run until August 2026 — included ‘A Year in Normandie’, the ‘Moon Room’ series, and new still lifes and portraits. The exhibition was free to the public.
In 2017, Hockney was invited by the Dean of Westminster Abbey to produce the stained-glass Queen’s Window in honour of Queen Elizabeth II, which was unveiled in October 2018. He was appointed by the late Queen to the Order of the Companions of Honour in 1997 and to the Order of Merit in 2012. In 2026, Hockney became one of the few non-French citizens to be awarded the rank of Officer in France’s prestigious Legion d’Honneur.
A career that nobody could pin down
Hockney was a lifelong and committed smoker and made no secret of it. He campaigned publicly against anti-smoking laws, calling them mean-spirited. And, he smoked until the end. He was partially deaf for much of his later life, which he managed with hearing aids.
Hockney built a six-decade career that refused to pin to one style. He moved between figuration and abstraction. Between photography and digital drawing. Between California and Yorkshire and Normandy. And, between intimate portraits and enormous landscape panoramas. He was also one of the most commercially successful artists of his era, with works in Tate, Metropolitan Museum, and private collections.
Historian Simon Schama wrote in an essay accompanying a 2025 Paris retrospective that the enduring appeal of Hockney’s art came from its assumption of pleasure. The work expected the viewer to enjoy looking. Across eight decades and more formats than most artists attempt in a lifetime, Hockney made that seem simple.
It was not.