David Hockney is perhaps Britain’s greatest living artist. The Bradford-born Royal Academician graduated from London’s Royal College of Art in 1962 with a gold medal for his year and his place already cemented in the British pop art scene. He secured his first gallery immediately upon graduation and his output has continued at full throttle ever since. To call Hockney prolific would be an understatement, but the influence and emotional power of his most important works are anything but ephemeral: they endure. A pluralist long before the term became as overused as it is today, Hockney has experimented with photo collage, video, multi-canvas landscapes, iPad drawings, hyperrealism, abstract expressionism and set design for opera. He bounds between visual styles and media, from high to popular culture, his extraordinary sense of optimism and beauty and hugely perceptive mind and eye being the unifying factors. While his seductive, saturated colours have inspired work by landmark figures of contemporary culture (Luca Guadagnino for film, Christopher Bailey for fashion, to name just two), Hockney’s poised compositions hold aeons of art history within their frames – there are, for example, nods to Fra Angelico, Chardin or, more recently, the Bayeux Tapestry. Hockney has co-written numerous books on the history of image-making – he is constantly interrogating the ways in which we experience the world around us, his curiosity and love of life irrepressible.
Paco Rabanne’s creative director, Julien Dossena, remembers first delving into Hockney’s work during a brief flirtation with art history before studying fashion at La Cambre National Visual Arts School in Brussels. He explains: “I remember seeing pictures of him and his friends in his everyday life that felt so joyful, almost like a cultural testimony to what he was going through inside his art, to his complete vision. It was really inspiring for me – his commitment to his
