David Hockney said he would keep painting until the very end. He was true to his word

“I’m just going to go on working ’til I fall over.” So said David Hockney, the renowned British artist, at the opening of his exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2016.

“I don’t go out much. I’m too deaf to go out of an evening … I just work. I’m perfectly happy.”

Hockney, who has died aged 88, produced some of the most recognisable works of contemporary art of the 20th century.

He died on Thursday in the UK, according to a statement released by his representatives: “The celebrated British artist David Hockney, one of the most important figures in contemporary art in both the 20th and 21st centuries, passed away peacefully at home on 11 June 2026, one month short of his 89th birthday.”

The Yorkshireman was born in 1937 in Bradford in England’s industrial north, but it was his sun-soaked, poolside images of California that he became best known for (along with his bleached blond hair and signature round glasses). His 1972 painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold for $124 million at auction in 2018, then a record for the most expensive work by a living artist.

True to his word, he kept on working almost until the last, including on his final major show, at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris in 2025.

As his health failed he used a wheelchair to paint at his London studio in the lead-up to last year’s retrospective, he told The New York Times.

“I just go on with my work,” he said. “When I come back from Paris, I’m going to carry on painting.”

The medium the painter employed changed radically over the decades: as an artist he was far ahead of his peers in his early and continued embrace of technology to make and display his works.

The 1200 artworks in his NGV show were from the prior 10 years of Hockney’s output, including many displayed on iPhones and others on large banks of screens, which recorded every brushstroke in vivid colour and detail.

“I first used a computer in 1986,” he told this masthead in 2016. “Drawing on it was OK but when you’d finish … the drawing itself [appeared] two minutes later. Just the lines were there.”

The arrival in 2009 of the iPhone then opened up a new world of creative possibilities through the Brush application, and more still with the iPad in 2010.

“I started drawing and I quickly realised this was a marvellous new medium … You could actually work in the dark, you could do a lot of things.

“If you draw on an iPad, you can play it back, every mark is recorded.”

Hockney’s brother John, one of his four siblings, migrated to Australia in the late 1960s and in 2019 published a book,The Hockneys: Never Worry What the Neighbours Think about his family and famous sibling.

At the NGV opening, John Hockney, whose portrait featured in the show, spoke with obvious pride in his brother’s artistry.

“It’s incredible, he becomes a totally different person with a brush in his hand,” he said.

“He screws his eyes up … he doesn’t rest, his eyes are on the portraits he’s actually doing. He’s totally focused, nothing else matters.”

He said he considered the Melbourne exhibition the greatest showcase he had seen of his brother’s work.

“I’ve seen his shows in San Francisco and elsewhere, but this is far, far the best ever.”

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