English artist David Hockney was BOTD in 1937. Born in Bradford, Yorkshire to a working-class family, he studied at the Bradford College of Art, before moving to London to attend the Royal College of Art. While still a student, his work featured in the influential New Contemporaries exhibition in 1960. Openly gay at a time when homosexuality was a criminal offence in England, he incorporated homoerotic themes into his early work, including 1961’s We Two Boys Together Clinging, inspired by the poetry of Walt Whitman. After several visits to the United States, he moved to Los Angeles in 1964, embracing sunshine, sexual freedom and modern dentistry. Profoundly influenced by the bright colours and modernist architecture of California, he created a series of large acrylic paintings of swimming pools, notably A Bigger Splash, Pool With Two Figures and Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool. Combining careful composition with bright colours, cartoon-like simplicity and unabashed homoeroticism, they quickly established him as a superstar of the 1960s Pop Art movement. He also created portraits of his friends, including the much-debated Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, featuring designers Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell and their cat Percy, with coded references to the couple’s marital infidelities. Many of his portraits featured his lovers Peter Schlesinger, Gregory Evans and John Fitzherbert, and celebrity friends including Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy. During the 1980s, he created a series of surrealist set designs for the New York Metropolitan Opera. An early adopter of digital technology, he began using computer paintboxes to create new work. Faced with poor health, he returned to Yorkshire 2005, where he began documenting the changing seasons of Northern England, creating images using an iPad. His coterie of friends came under scrutiny in 2013, following the drug-related death of his 23 year-old personal assistant Dominic Elliot, though Hockney and his team were cleared of any responsibility for his death. During the COVID pandemic in 2020, Hockney retreated to a farmhouse in Normandy, creating the much-admired series The Arrival of Spring, chronicling the day-to-day sights of the farm across 18 months. One the most popular and influential artists in the world, his work has been the subject of recent retrospectives at the Tate Modern and the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. In 2018, Pool with Two Figures sold at auction for US$90 million, at the time the highest sum paid at auction for a work by a living artist. Hockney lives in Bridlington, East Yorkshire, with his partner Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima.