Hockney, David

   b. 1937, Bradford

   Painter

   David Hockney attended Bradford School of Art from 1953–9. His early scenes of domestic and urban realism were shaped by a traditional art school training and the influences of the Euston Road School and Kitchen Sink artists. An outstanding student at the Royal College of Art (1959– 62), Hockney experimented with pure abstract painting before striving to incorporate its modernist tendencies within a more substantial figurative framework.

   At the RCA, Hockney’s fellow students included R.B.Kitaj, Derek Boushier and Peter Phillips, artists who participated in the 1961 Young Contemporaries Exhibition with Hockney and were identified as exponents of 1960s pop art. In a dawning age of celebrity and consumerism, Hockney’s self-consciously stylistic, witty, graffitied and allusive art and eccentric public personality qualified him as a ‘pop artist’, a label he staunchly rejected. Early debates about Hockney’s standing in a British arts tradition often stemmed from the apparent incompatibility of his roles as both serious artist and socialite, despite the strongly autobiographical vein in his work and his intimate friends and surroundings, homosexuality and lifestyle providing an expressive focus. His first solo exhibition at Kasmin’s Gallery, London in 1963 was soon followed by a formative trip to Los Angeles (Hockney eventually emigrated there in 1976). Homoerotic scenes were inspired by American physique magazines, the visual stimuli of his and others’ photographic sources tellingly influential in his art. Showers, swimming pools and reflective surfaces appeared as frequent motifs in otherwise minimalist depictions of a selective Los Angeles landscape during a period which instigated flatter, more naturalistic, acrylic painted representations. During the 1970s, the restrictive effects of naturalism concentrated efforts on drawing and etching until 1977, when Hockney and Kitaj championed a return to representational art. Selfportraits, still-lifes, landscapes and characteristic largescale double compositions continued to abound. Hockney’s early 1960s preoccupation with theatricality, artifice and spectatorship was later fulfilled through his stage design for productions like Ubu Roi (1966) and Turandot (1990). Hockney has repeatedly demonstrated an insatiable curiosity for exploring new styles and mediums through a subjective collage-like approach actualized in his later post-cubist fascination with perspectival art, involving photo-collages, fax, photocopier and computerized images. Despite his Los Angeles residency. Hockney arguably remains the most acclaimed British artist alive, his work perhaps criticized for its stylistic hollowness but celebrated for its inventive, fearless artistic explorations of contradictory preoccupations.

   Further reading

    Melia, P. (1995) David Hockney, Manchester: Manchester University Press (critically incisive essays chronicling aspects of Hockney’s oeuvre).

   SATINDER CHOHAN