David Hockney
Born in 1937 in Bradford, David Hockney is one of the most unconventional and defiantly categorised figures in 20th-century art. Trained at the Royal College of Art in London, he developed his artistic vision through his engagement with British social realism, American abstract expressionism, Dubuffet and Bacon. The 1960 Picasso retrospective revealed his path: for him, pictorial styles and schools would be nothing more than elements of a visual vocabulary in the service of subjective expression, making eclecticism a fully embraced approach.
His move to Los Angeles in 1964 marked a decisive turning point: the Californian light drew him towards acrylics and an intense, almost immaterial visual style. His famous swimming pools, followed by the large double portraits of the 1970s — haunted by Hopper, Balthus and Vermeer — demonstrate his ability to combine narrative content with formal experimentation, deepening a constant reflection on the representation and reproduction of images.
In the early 1980s, his reinterpretation of Picasso’s Cubism led him to juxtapose photographic images as so many simultaneous viewpoints, breaking free from the laws of traditional perspective — a line of thought continued in his paintings inspired by Chinese scrolls, where space is traversed rather than fixed. His return to Yorkshire in 2004 and his adoption of the iPad ushered in a final technological chapter: Bigger Trees Near Warter (2007) and the multi-screen installations of the Four Seasons reveal an artist who has always known how to use every new tool as a vehicle for his inexhaustible curiosity.
