David Hockney died at home on 11 June 2026 at the age of 88, his publicist said, one month short of his 89th birthday.
Hockney was a defining figure of 20th- and 21st-century contemporary art and a leader of the 1960s pop art movement; his 1972 painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures) sold for $90.3m at Christie’s in November 2018, a world record at the time for a living artist.
Born in Bradford in 1937, Hockney sold his first painting — a portrait of his father — for £10 at the Yorkshire Artists Exhibition in 1957, completed two years of national service as a hospital orderly as a conscientious objector, and enrolled at London’s Royal College of Art in 1959.
Across a long career he worked in paint, photographs, iPad drawings, etchings, lithographs, stained glass, opera design and pen and ink, becoming best known for pool paintings and frank depictions of gay life during an era when homosexuality was a criminal offence in Britain until 1967.
Hockney’s output was both popular and commercially powerful: the 2018 sale to a private buyer remains one of the highest-price moments of his market; gallery shows, prints and public projects kept his name prominent through decades of changing trends.
He continued to make work after a stroke in 2012 temporarily impaired his speech, and he retained a straightforward artistic credo — “Paint the things you love” — that guided projects from the 1960s through the later use of digital tools and public commissions.
There is a tension in the record of his life. Hockney was celebrated as one of modern art’s most visible figures, yet he said he was surprised by the public enthusiasm for his work, and he often spoke of his roots in a “radical working-class family” as part of a practical, almost bemused relationship to fame.
Immediate consequences of his death are cultural: his passing will prompt museums, galleries and collectors to reassess exhibitions, retrospectives and holdings, and it closes the chapter on an artist whose career spanned a volatile half-century of social change and market transformation.
No cause of death was given. His publicist’s statement that he passed away at home stands as the sole contemporaneous detail about the event, and no next public event, service or announcement has been confirmed.
For now the clearest fact is the end of a long, visible career: Hockney leaves a body of work that altered perceptions of painting and image-making, a market record that underscored his commercial standing, and an unresolved practical question about arrangements and official memorials — none of which have been confirmed.
