David Hockney

David Hockney creates drawings, paintings, photographs, prints, and stage designs depicting landscapes, still lifes, domestic interiors, and figurative works. Hockney is deeply influenced by his environment. Attending art school in Bradford, Yorkshire, and the Royal College of Art in London from the 1950s to the early 1960s led to a moody color palette reflecting Britain's muted, damp, and dismal climate. Upon moving to Los Angeles in 1964, he embraced bright, pastel colors—turquoise, yellow, pink—conjuring the light of the city.

His work resists easy categorization, and although usually associated with Pop Art, his style and color palette have shifted dramatically over the decades.

In Los Angeles, Hockney created iconic works such as A Bigger Splash (1967) and Beverly Hills Housewife (1966-67), which capture the late-sixties Southern California atmosphere, defining the way the city has been depicted in art. At this time, Hockney began taking Polaroids and soon began to use photography as both a compositional source and physical material with which to create collages of photographic prints. In the early 2000s, Hockney returned to his origins and began making landscape paintings outdoors, or en plein-air, in his native Yorkshire, England. 

For Luna Luna, Hockney designed a cylindrical chamber made of panels painted with blue, red, and green trees, reducing the complexity of the organic form to evocative geometric shapes. Visitors entered this structure through a rounded arch to encounter a second cylinder formed from similarly painted tree panels. A lattice of arches cut to mimic the curves of branches allowed visitors to enter the installation’s center, while classical music by Johann and Joseph Strauss enhanced this magical experience. Stylistically, the attraction uses the brightly colored forms of Hockney’s stage sets, visually akin to the trees featured in his design for the Stravinsky Triple Bill at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1981.