12/06/2026
David Hockney 💙 1937 – 2026
Our thoughts are with the friends and family of David Hockney, one of Britain’s best loved contemporary artists.
Hockney was one of the most internationally respected, renowned, and influential contemporary artists. Born in Bradford, Yorkshire in 1937, Hockney rose to fame in the Pop art movement in the 1960s, and over the next six decades, his work embraced drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, and stage design. His inventive visual language took many different stylistic turns from early pen and ink, and coloured pencil drawings to his more recent experiments with watercolour and digital technology. As one of the world’s leading figurative artists, the National Portrait Gallery was privileged to collaborate with Hockney on several occasions, including the major David Hockney Portraits exhibition in 2006, and the recent David Hockney: Drawing from Life in 2020 and 2023. Many of his self-portraits now call our Collection their home, including Self-Portrait with Charlie (2005), currently on display in Room 30.
Portraits and people were central to his exploration of the world and a crucial part of his many creative endeavours, he said: ‘I am constantly preoccupied with how to remove distance so that we can all come closer together, so that we can all begin to sense we are the same, we are one.’
📸 David Parry
