AP said Bolton did not give a cause of death. Thames & Hudson, Hockney's long-time publisher, identified his life dates as 9 July 1937 to 11 June 2026.
Hockney was born in Bradford, West Yorkshire, and studied at Bradford College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London, according to the Guardian. He became associated with the British and American art scenes of the 1960s before moving much of his life and work between Britain, Southern California, Yorkshire and Normandy.
His best-known public image came from Los Angeles. AP and the Guardian both identified his paintings of swimming pools and Southern California light as central to his reputation, including "A Bigger Splash" and "Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)." AP reported that the 1972 pool painting sold at Christie's in 2018 for $90.3m, at the time a record auction price for a living artist.
The pool paintings were only one part of the career. AP said Hockney worked in painting, collage, photography and digital drawing across seven decades. The Guardian reported that he also made photo-collages, abstract landscapes and later work using emerging 3D technology, while ABC News noted his later iPad drawings and renewed attention to Yorkshire and Normandy landscapes.
That range is the central fact of the obituary, because Hockney's institutional legacy is not only a market story. The David Hockney Foundation says its mission is to advance appreciation and understanding of visual art and culture through the exhibition, preservation and publication of Hockney's work. The foundation's role gives his estate an organised route for future scholarship and exhibitions.
Art historian Simon Schama, writing in an essay for a 2025 Hockney exhibition in Paris and quoted by ABC, attributed the durability of Hockney's appeal to his experiments across forms and the pleasure viewers found in the work. That is an outside art-historical assessment, not a claim made by the artist's estate.
Museum statements gave the institutional view. The Guardian reported that Alex Farquharson, director of Tate Britain, described Hockney as an inventive artist with a distinct way of seeing, and said Tate planned to stage a major exhibition of his work at Tate Britain next year, in 2027, along with a multimedia installation in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall. The same Guardian report said the Pompidou Centre in Paris, which had collaborated with Hockney on two exhibitions, called him a major figure in contemporary art.