English artist David Hockney has died. He was 88.
Hockney was an uncategorizable, multidisciplinary master of perspective whose fascination with new tools and technologies burned brightly right to the end. He was beloved for his vibrant landscape works and evocative portraits, but—as evidenced by a two-floor exhibition of iPad paintings, Xeroxed prints, and Polaroid shots currently on view at Portland Art Museum (PAM)—Hockney was a lifelong experimenter.
Raised in a working-class mill town in Yorkshire, Hockney relocated to Los Angeles in the 1960s. There, his career flourished and he created the colorful works for which he is best known—sun-drenched, languid scenes of pools, palm trees, and modernist interiors that feel exuberant yet slightly melancholic.
Hockney, who came out as gay as a Royal College of Art student while homosexuality was still criminalized in Britain, also depicted queer intimacy with a candor that was rare at the time. He brought a sense of tenderness and desire to his work that paired brilliantly with his mischievous color palette and perceptive observations of the everyday.
The show at PAM, David Hockney: Works from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation, spans six decades of Hockney’s career, revealing that Hockney was as adaptable as he was prolific. His practice endured into his 80s through this embrace of new tech and perspectives. Some of Hockney’s most recent works were “photographic drawings,” channeling his concept of “reverse perspective” and positing that the viewer is the vanishing point.
No cause of death has been announced.
For a more intimate view of Hockney’s life and work, see the documentary A Bigger Splash (1973) at Whitsell Auditorium on June 14. Jack Hazan’s film follows the artist and his circle in the 1970s; it’s a revealing portrait of Hockney’s life at the height of his creative power.
