British artist David Hockney dies at 88

David Hockney, one of the most influential figures in contemporary art and best known for his Los Angeles swimming pool paintings, died at his home in London yesterday, Thursday, at the age of 88. He was born in July 1937 in Bradford, England, and studied at the Royal College of Art in London. He died just a month before what would have been his 89th birthday.

Over a long career, Hockney became one of the artists most closely associated with British Pop Art while developing a highly personal visual language. His best-known works were the swimming pool series he created after moving to California, paintings marked by vivid color and a realist style that became icons of American art in the second half of the 20th century.

Hockney worked across painting, printmaking, photography, opera set design, and digital art. He designed sets for major opera houses, including La Scala in Milan, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and the Glyndebourne Festival in England. In 2018, his painting “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” sold at Christie’s in New York for $90.3 million, then the highest price ever paid for a work by a living artist.

He was also known for groundbreaking photographic experiments, including collage works made from dozens or even hundreds of images to explore how human vision works and to show reality from multiple viewpoints at once. In his final years, he continued creating with both traditional and digital methods, leaving a vast body of work that shaped generations of artists.