b. Bradford, England 1937

A pioneer of the British Pop Art movement in the early 1960s, David Hockney is considered to be one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century. David Hockney gained recognition for his semi-abstract paintings on the theme of homosexual love before it was decriminalized in England in 1967. In We Two Boys Clinging Together (1961), red-painted couples embrace one other while floating amidst fragments from a Walt Whitman poem. After moving to California at the end of 1963, Hockney began painting scenes of the sensual and uninhibited life of athletic young men, depicting swimming pools, palm trees, and perpetual sunshine. Experimenting with photography in the mid-1970s, Hockney went on to create his famous photocollages with Polaroids and snapshot prints arranged in a grid formation, pushing the two-dimensionality of photography to the limit, fragmenting the monocular vision of the camera and activating the viewer in the process. A versatile artist, Hockney has produced work in almost every medium and his work can be found in numerous public and private collections worldwide, such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo.

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