David Hockney (b. 1937) is the most celebrated living British artist — a Bradford-born painter, draughtsman, printmaker, photographer, and stage designer whose career of nearly seven decades has encompassed some of the most significant bodies of work in the history of post-war art.
He studied at the Royal College of Art in London, where he featured alongside Peter Blake in the Young Contemporaries exhibition of 1961 — a show subsequently described as announcing the arrival of British Pop Art. His move to Los Angeles in 1964 produced the swimming pool paintings that remain among the most recognisable and sought-after works in his catalogue, their saturated California light and compositional clarity capturing a specific quality of place and moment with a precision that has made them genuinely iconic.
His practice has been defined by restless formal curiosity — portraits of friends, lovers, and family; fairy tale illustrations; seasonal landscapes of his native Yorkshire; Cubist-influenced multi-panel photographic works he called joiners; and, most recently, iPad drawings that apply the logic of his entire career to a entirely new medium. The Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold at Christie's New York in November 2018 for $90 million — a record for a living artist at the time.
Major retrospectives at the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Royal Academy (2012), Tate Britain (2017, subsequently travelling to Paris and New York), and the National Portrait Gallery (2020) have confirmed his canonical status across successive generations of critics and collectors.
The Older Rapunzel etching from his 1969 Brothers Grimm suite — available through Creed Gallery — is among the most quietly accomplished works in his graphic output: economy of line, psychological precision, and the formal confidence of someone who has been drawing seriously for decades. Available through Creed Gallery, Ascot, for collectors across Berkshire, Surrey, and London. Private viewings by appointment.
