David Hockney, widely regarded to be one of the most influential contemporary British artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, has died. He was 88.
The news was announced by Hockney’s publicist to the BBC.
“The celebrated British artist David Hockney, one of the most important figures in contemporary art in both the 20th and 21st centuries, passed away peacefully at home on 11 June 2026, one month short of his 89th birthday,” they said in a statement.
Born in 1937 in the U.K. county of Yorkshire, Hockney rose to prominence in the 1960s as part of the Pop Art movement. Having moved to Los Angeles in 1963, he became renowned for his series of pictures depicting sun-drenched swimming pools — including “A Bigger Splash” (Luca Guadagnino named his 2015 film after the painting) — plus more intimate portraits of his social circle.
Regularly voted British favorite artist, Hockney — instantly recognisable for his peroxide blonde hair, round glasses and flat cap — would be celebrated for his talents across almost every medium, including paint, photographs, etchings, lithographs, stained glass windows and digital.
In the 1980s, Hockney would embrace Polaroid collages and would later use an iPad to create a series of digital paintings. He returned to the U.K. in the early 2000s, and would help capture the changing seasons of the Yorkshire countryside.
While Hockney largely avoided celebrity culture in his work, in 2023 he painted Harry Styles at his studio in Normandy.
In 2018 one of Hockney’s swimming pool paintings sold for nearly £70 million ($93 million) in auction — a record for a living artist.
Despite having limited involvement in film himself, he was subject of Jack Hazan’s 1974 biopic, also called “A Bigger Splash,” and was the inspiration for Billy Pappas’ documentary “Waiting for Hockney,” which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2008. In 2022, he was portrayed by Laurence Fuller in the an episode of the first season of “Minx.”
Among the many honors Hockney received throughout his career were two from the late Queen Elizabeth II, who appointed him to the Order of the Companions of Honour in 1997 and to the Order of Merit in 2012.
