Associated with pop art, though not limited to it, Hockney drew on landscape painting, cubism for multiple viewpoints, photography, and later digital tools. His most iconic canvases remain tied to 1960s–1970s California: A Bigger Splash (1967) with its still pool disturbed by a splash, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972), and Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1970–1971).
In Paris, his work has been highlighted several times. The Centre Pompidou dedicated in 1999 an exhibition David Hockney, Space/Landscape, followed by a major retrospective in 2017, organized with Tate Britain and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Orangerie Museum presented in 2021 A Year in Normandy, a long iPad-made frieze inspired by the Normandy seasons and conceived in dialogue with Monet's Water Lilies. Finally, the Louis Vuitton Foundation hosted in 2025 David Hockney 25, a wide-ranging show gathering more than 400 works spanning several decades of creation.
Rather than chasing spectacle, Hockney mainly pushed the boundaries of painting: from canvas to photography, from the Polaroid to the iPad, he pursued the same simple question — how to represent the world as the way we see it keeps changing.
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