Remember That You Cannot Look At The Sun Or Death For Very Long

David Hockney

David Hockney was one of the most influential and beloved artists of our time. Across painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, stage design and digital media, he spent more than six decades expanding the possibilities of image-making while remaining devoted to the simple but profound act of looking. His work celebrated 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 was characterised by a restless curiosity and a continual willingness to experiment. Throughout his career, he 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 reflected 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 consistently challenged assumptions about how images are made and experienced. Yet beneath the technical experimentation lied 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 reminded 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.