Artist David Hockney dies at 88

David Hockney, one of the most celebrated and influential British artists of the past sixty years, has died at his home in London at the age of 88, a month shy of his 89th birthday. His publicist, Erica Bolton, confirmed that he passed away peacefully on 11th June, describing him as one of the defining figures in contemporary art across both the 20th and 21st centuries.

Born in Bradford, Yorkshire, in 1937, Hockney trained at Bradford School of Art before moving on to London’s Royal College of Art, emerging in the 1960s as a leading voice of the British pop art movement. He went on to build a career that spanned painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, and stage design, with a restless curiosity that later saw him embrace digital tools, producing vivid works composed entirely on an iPad.

Hockney became closely associated with Southern California, where he lived on and off from the mid-1960s, and where the sun-drenched swimming pools and clean architectural lines of Los Angeles became a recurring subject in his work. Paintings from this period, including his swimming pool scenes, remain among his most recognisable and widely reproduced images. In later decades he split his time between homes in Yorkshire, London, and Normandy, continuing to paint landscapes well into his eighties.

Over his career, Hockney received numerous honours, including the Order of Merit in 2012 and membership of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 1997. A major retrospective of his Yorkshire landscape work at the Royal Academy drew enormous crowds, cementing his status as a national treasure.

Tributes have poured in from across the art world and beyond. Buckingham Palace released a statement on behalf of King Charles and Queen Camilla, who said they were greatly saddened by the news and that Hockney would be “sorely missed,” reflecting the affection in which he was held well beyond gallery walls.

Hockney’s influence on generations of artists, his experiments with form, colour, and technology, and his enduring fascination with everyday beauty are likely to ensure his work remains widely studied and exhibited for decades to come.