David Hockney was an important artist who rose to prominence in Britain in the 1960s. When he first attracted attention, he was still a student at the Royal College of Art in London. Alongside fellow students and more senior classmates, including Allen Jones and R. B. Kitaj, he participated in the 1961 annual Young Contemporaries exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, helping usher in a new British Pop aesthetic.

In 1964, Hockney moved from London to Los Angeles and began painting Southern California life: rolling hills, swimming pools and modernist architecture, often with homoerotic undertones. Landscape also became an important subject in his work, from paintings and collages made with Polaroids and 35 mm color film in the 1980s to mural-scale panoramas and stage sets. In recent years, he has worked on an iPad, continuing to explore the relationships between visual perception, space and technology.

Tate Britain, the Centre Pompidou, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art organized a major retrospective honoring Hockney’s enduring artistic career. Even in his eighties, he continues to create. His work is held by major art institutions around the world, including the British Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Hayward Gallery Art Society in London.

David Hockney is loved by many for his ability to engage with the ordinary—the stuff of which most of the world is made. He likes to leave it a little open-ended and draw us in: Hockney offers a subject while inviting us to take part in interpreting the scene.

We return to 1964, when 27-year-old David Hockney moved from Britain to sunny California. Inspired by the environment of the American West Coast, he painted numerous pictures of swimming pools, with or without people, usually in delicate shades of pink, light blue, or light green.

Today, David Hockney lives in Normandy, where he continues to experiment with materials and capture the local atmosphere through his wonderful lines and assured sense of color.