David Hockney | Untitled (Sprinklers) 1976

David Hockney | Untitled (Sprinklers), 1976
Chromogenic Print
7 9/10 × 9 4/5 in
20 × 25 cm
Signed and numbered
Edition of 25

David Hockney | Untitled (Sprinklers), 1976. David Hockney (1937 – Present)  was born in Bradford, West Riding of Yorkshire in 1937. He was educated at Bradford Grammar School and Bradford College of Art, where he studied under Frank Lisle. He later went to the Royal College of Art, where he was featured in his first exhibition titled Young Contemporaries, an exhibit geared towards marking the arrival of British Pop art. Whilst closely associated with the Pop Art movement in the months after this feature, his early works could be more accurately described as expressionist in the style of Francis Bacon. Following his graduation from the RCA, Hockney taught at the Maidstone College of Art.

David Hockney

Hockney has been featured in over 400 solo exhibitions and over 500 group exhibitions over his career. His first solo exhibition took place at Kasmin Ltd in 1963, and by 1970 his first retrospective was held at the Whitechapel Gallery. The exhibition travelled to three European institutions. LACMA hosted a retrospective exhibition in 1988 which toured to The Met in New York and the Tate in London.

In October 2006, the National Portrait Gallery in London displayed over 150 paintings, drawings, prints, sketchbooks and photo-collages representative of Hockney’s evolution over the past fifty years of his career. This huge showcase of his portraiture ran until 2007 and was one of the most successful exhibitions of the gallery’s decade.

The Royal Academy held A Bigger Picture in 2012, exhibiting a vast array of Hockney’s works, with a focus on his natural landscapes. The exhibition later moved to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, and on to the Ludwig Museum in Cologne. The David Hockney exhibition at the Tate Britain in 2017 had similar success, earning the title of the gallery’s most visited exhibition of all time. The show traveled to Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hockney exhibited his new work at Pace Gallery in 2018 and held a retrospective at The Hepworth Wakefield in 2019.

Collectors of Hockney’s works are worldwide. The lion share of his art work resides at The David Hockney Foundation, with others residing in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the National Portrait Gallery, London; the Tate, London; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa), New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Mumok in Vienna and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.