David Hockney is often described as ‘Britain’s most famous living artist’. Born in Bradford, he studied at the city’s school of art in the 1950s before attending the Royal College of Art in London (1959–62). There his fellow student, R. B. Kitaj, encouraged him to abandon abstraction, after which his work reflected the personal events of his own life, including a frank approach to his sexuality.
Hockney visited New York in 1961 and eventually moved to Los Angeles in 1963. His first solo exhibition took place that year; followed in 1970 by his first retrospective at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London. 1988 saw the opening of a major retrospective of his work in Los Angeles that toured to New York and London.
'A Bigger Picture', an exhibition featuring over 150 of Hockney’s landscapes was held at the Royal Academy in 2012. He produced many of his drawings on an iPad and printed on paper. In 2014, 'David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition' was shown at the De Young Museum in San Francisco. A major retrospective exhibition of his work opened at Tate Britain in 2017, before touring to Paris and New York.
