David Hockney, the Bradford-born painter who became one of the most influential and beloved British artists of the past century, has died at his home in London at the age of 88. He passed away on June 11, 2026.
Few artists shaped the popular image of modern art quite like Hockney. A central figure in the British Pop art movement of the 1960s, he announced his arrival at the Royal College of Art alongside Peter Blake before moving to Los Angeles in 1964, where the California sun and swimming pools gave him his most enduring subject. Works like ‘A Bigger Splash’ and ‘Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)’ came to define an era, the latter selling at Christie’s in 2018 for $90 million, then a record for any living artist at auction.
His range was staggering. Across six decades, Hockney moved fluidly between painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, opera set design, and emerging technology, never losing his appetite for the next tool. He built Cubist-inspired photo collages he called “joiners,” sketched on fax machines and Quantel Paintboxes, and in his later years embraced the iPad as a serious instrument, drawing hundreds of landscapes and portraits and even designing a stained glass window for Westminster Abbey to celebrate Queen Elizabeth II’s reign.
He returned often to his native Yorkshire, painting its countryside en plein air on monumental multi-canvas works like ‘Bigger Trees Near Warter,’ which he donated to the Tate. His blockbuster exhibitions drew enormous crowds, and his 2017 retrospective became the most-visited show in Tate Britain’s history.
Hockney came out as gay at 23, years before homosexuality was decriminalised in Britain, and explored gay love openly in his work from early on. He drew repeatedly from the people closest to him, including longtime partner and business associate Gregory Evans, Peter Schlesinger, and friends like Celia Birtwell and Ossie Clark.
Known for his vivid palette, his sharp wit, and his lifelong refusal to stop experimenting, Hockney leaves behind a body of work housed in major collections around the world and a foundation safeguarding more than 8,000 of his pieces. He was, as a 2012 poll of British artists declared, the most influential artist his country had produced in a generation.