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David Hockney, one of the most famous contemporary British painters and among the most important and highly regarded artists of the 20th century, passed away on 11 June at the age of 88. With him, contemporary art loses a fundamental figure: an artist who, over more than seventy years of research, never stopped observing, experimenting and reinventing the language of painting.
Born in Bradford, Yorkshire, in 1937, Hockney created an immediately recognisable visual universe, made of light, colour, compositional freedom and constant attention to visual perception. Associated with British Pop Art, yet always independent from any overly rigid definition, he was able to bring together figuration, popular culture, technical experimentation and an intense reflection on the way we look at the world.
His painting is clear, bright, apparently simple and yet profoundly complex. In his works, light becomes structure, colour becomes atmosphere, and space opens up into unexpected perspectives. Hockney worked with painting, drawing, engraving, photography, collage, set design and digital tools, demonstrating a rare curiosity and an absolute faith in art’s ability to renew itself through the languages of its time.
The swimming pools and the record of Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)
Among the most celebrated subjects in his work are undoubtedly the Californian swimming pools. After moving to Los Angeles in the 1960s, Hockney became fascinated by the light of California, modernist architecture, open spaces and a new sense of visual and personal freedom.
In his swimming pools, water is never merely a decorative element. It is surface, movement, reflection, desire. Ripples, transparencies and plays of light become painterly matter, transforming apparently everyday scenes into suspended, silent and absolute images.
What made this imagery even more iconic was Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), the 1972 painting and one of Hockney’s most celebrated works. In 2018, the painting was sold at Christie’s in New York for 90.3 million dollars, setting at the time the world record for a living artist. It was a result that confirmed not only the artist’s market value, but also the universal power of his vision.
David Hockney: Golden Hour, LaChapelle’s tribute
Hockney’s imagery was so powerful that it has been taken up, celebrated and reinterpreted by other major figures in contemporary art. Among them, David LaChapelle dedicated to him the work David Hockney: Golden Hour, created in 2017.
In the photograph, LaChapelle creates a refined tribute to Hockney’s visual universe, recalling the atmosphere and composition of Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures). Yet the point of view shifts: at the centre of the scene is no longer only the reference to the famous painting, but Hockney himself, portrayed as the protagonist of his own myth.
LaChapelle thus transforms quotation into celebration. The swimming pool, the golden light and the presence of the artist become the elements of a portrait suspended between memory, icon and staging. It is an encounter between two deeply recognisable languages: on one side, Hockney’s luminous, analytical and free painting; on the other, LaChapelle’s theatrical, pop and visionary photography.
The legacy of a master
David Hockney leaves behind an immense legacy. He was a painter of light, freedom and perception; an artist capable of making the ordinary memorable and of transforming the act of seeing into an ever-new experience.
His swimming pools, portraits, Yorkshire landscapes, digital experiments and unmistakable way of thinking about the image will continue to influence generations of artists, collectors and art lovers.
With his passing, a fundamental chapter in contemporary art comes to a close, but his imagery remains alive: in the blue of the water, in the Californian light, in the bright colours and in that continuous search for freedom that made David Hockney one of the great masters of our time.
