fbpx David Hockney | CIRCA

David Hockney is one of the most influential and beloved artists of our time. Across painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, stage design and digital media, he has spent more than six decades expanding the possibilities of image-making while remaining devoted to the simple but profound act of looking. His work celebrates the experience of seeing, transforming everyday observations into extraordinary meditations on light, colour, space and time.

Emerging from Britain’s post-war art scene in the early 1960s, Hockney quickly established himself as a defining voice in contemporary art. From the swimming pools of Los Angeles and double portraits of friends and family to vast landscapes of Yorkshire and Normandy, his work is characterised by a restless curiosity and a continual willingness to experiment. Throughout his career, he has embraced new technologies and methods of making, becoming one of the first major artists to fully integrate photography, video and digital drawing into an established artistic practice.

Hockney’s relationship with CIRCA reflects his lifelong commitment to bringing art into public life. In 2021, he collaborated with CIRCA on Remember That You Cannot Look At The Sun Or Death For Very Long, a landmark public commission curated by Josef O’Connor that united public screens across London, New York, Los Angeles, Seoul and Tokyo in a shared global broadcast. Created from a sequence of iPad drawings made in Normandy during the COVID-19 pandemic, the animated sunrise transformed some of the world’s most iconic advertising screens into a collective moment of hope and reflection, connecting audiences across multiple continents through a single artwork. In 2024, CIRCA collaborated once again with Hockney to bring his work to Glastonbury Festival, extending his vision to one of the world’s most celebrated cultural gatherings and introducing new audiences to his enduring fascination with the natural world.

Long recognised as one of the great innovators of contemporary art, Hockney has consistently challenged assumptions about how images are made and experienced. Yet beneath the technical experimentation lies a profound humanism and optimism: a belief that paying attention to the world is both an artistic act and a way of being fully alive. Through works that continue to inspire wonder, David Hockney reminds us that beauty, observation and imagination remain among our most valuable resources.

His work is held in major collections worldwide and has been the subject of landmark exhibitions at Tate, the Royal Academy of Arts, Centre Pompidou, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and countless institutions across the globe. Few living artists have had such a lasting impact on how we see, understand and experience the world through images.

 

Circa Commissions

David Hockney, Remember you cannot look at the sun or death for very long

Entitled ‘Remember you cannot look at the sun or death for very long’, the video work by one of the world’s most celebrated living artists, David Hockney, was unveiled across a network of the world’s most iconic outdoor video screens in New York’s Times Square, Seoul, Tokyo, Los Angeles and the…

View more

David Hockney: Let The Sunshine In

Written by Henry Little

Dawn. A blue sky shot with red. Silhouettes of sleeping shrubs. A single bird traverses the full width of the horizon. A child-like sun, wobbly arms for rays, rises in the distance. Higher the sun rises, a second corona of wobbly rays appear. Higher and whiter the disc rises, until a third corona of longer fingers extend out towards the viewer, licking the foreground. A fourth spiral of yellow rays now fills the thin band of the horizontal composition, on the cusp of enveloping the entire scene. Thicker, heavier lines appear, ray upon ray. The scene fades to vivid, bright saturated yellow. The yellow of cartoon lemons and street lamps. The work’s title is etched in shaky letters across this final backdrop: Remember you cannot look at the sun or death for very long.

David Hockney’s new work for CIRCA will play for the month of May across the world on giant screens in London, Seoul, Tokyo, Los Angeles and New York. Spanning the full circumference of the globe, Hockney’s animated dawn will follow real dawn thirty-one times. Screened in the evenings, viewers will see the sun rise once again, not long after it dipped below the horizon. Coinciding in London with the opening of the Royal Academy’s new exhibition, David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020, the project further marks a moment of renewal for the country’s battered museums and the city’s dormant but fast rousing arts scene.

Shop

Loading products...

Subscribe to our newsletter

Subscription successful

An error occurred