David Hockney's Viewers Looking at Ready-made with Skull and Mirrors, 2018, available at Andipa
Discover how David Hockney has embraced photography, printmaking and digital technology to redefine modern art, from his experimental photographic collages to his pioneering iPad paintings and immersive exhibitions in Australia.
Few modern artists have explored the relationship between art and technology as consistently as David Hockney. Throughout his career, the British artist has embraced new tools not as substitutes for traditional artistic practice, but as opportunities to discover different ways of seeing, recording and interpreting the world.
From his photographic collages of the 1980s to his pioneering digital paintings created on an iPhone and iPad, Hockney has repeatedly challenged the idea that artistic innovation depends on a particular medium. His work demonstrates that painting, photography, printmaking and digital technology can coexist within a single artistic vision, each offering different possibilities for representing time, space, colour and perception.
For Hockney, technology has never been simply about novelty. It is a means of asking fundamental questions about how we see and how images communicate experience. This enduring curiosity has helped establish him as one of the most influential British artists of the modern era. As audiences continue to explore his work through exhibitions around the world, including two major presentations in Australia in 2026, Hockney's experiments with technology feel particularly relevant. His career offers a compelling perspective on how traditional artistic skills can evolve alongside new ways of making and experiencing art.
David Hockney: An Artist Who Never Stopped Experimenting
Born in Bradford in 1937, David Hockney studied at Bradford School of Art before attending the Royal College of Art in London. He emerged during the early 1960s as a distinctive voice in British contemporary art, developing a visual language characterised by vivid colour, confident composition and an enduring interest in everyday life.
His early paintings explored subjects ranging from domestic interiors and swimming pools to portraits and landscapes. Works depicting Californian swimming pools became particularly associated with his practice, using simplified forms, brilliant blues and carefully observed reflections to capture the visual qualities of sunlight and water. Even at this early stage, Hockney was interested in how images could communicate different ways of experiencing the world.
This curiosity extended beyond painting. He experimented with printmaking, stage design, photography and drawing, consistently questioning the limitations of individual media. Rather than regarding these disciplines as separate, he treated them as complementary ways of exploring visual perception. His subsequent engagement with photography and digital technology emerged from this same impulse: the desire to discover what a new medium might make possible.
Photographic Collage: Challenging the Single Image
During the 1980s, Hockney began experimenting extensively with photography, producing works that challenged the conventional idea that a photograph should capture a single, unified view of a subject. His photographic collages, often referred to as joiners, combined multiple photographs into larger compositions. By assembling images taken from different viewpoints and at different moments, he created works that reflected the movement of the eye and the experience of looking around a space.
Rather than presenting a scene through one fixed camera position, these compositions brought together fragmented perspectives, creating a more complex understanding of time and space. Works such as Pearblossom Highway (1986) demonstrate this approach. Constructed from numerous individual photographs, the image presents a road and its surrounding landscape through a shifting sequence of viewpoints, challenging the assumption that a single photograph can fully represent the experience of seeing. Hockney's photographic experiments also anticipated important questions about digital image-making. Long before image-editing software became commonplace, he was exploring how individual pictures could be combined, reordered and transformed to create a new visual experience. His work demonstrated that photography need not be a purely documentary medium. It could be manipulated, constructed and approached with the same creative freedom as painting.
From Fax Machines to the iPad: Hockney's Digital Revolution
Hockney's interest in technology began long before digital painting became widespread. In 1988, he experimented with fax machines, using them to transmit drawings of portraits, landscapes and still-life arrangements. He adapted his techniques to the technology, exploring how an unfamiliar medium could produce new visual effects.
His most significant technological development came with the adoption of the iPhone in 2009 and the iPad in 2010. Using digital drawing applications, Hockney discovered a medium that allowed him to draw directly onto a screen, layering colours and marks with remarkable immediacy. The iPad offered particular advantages for an artist fascinated by light and the changing appearance of the natural world. He could work quickly, capturing a sunrise or the shifting colours of a landscape without preparing canvases, paints or brushes.
His digital paintings of Yosemite Valley, created in 2011, demonstrate how this technology could accommodate expansive landscapes as well as intimate observations. Rather than abandoning traditional painting, Hockney extended its possibilities, retaining the importance of drawing, composition and colour that defines his wider practice. For Hockney, the technology itself was never the subject. What mattered was how it could help him see and represent the world differently.
Digital Art, Nature and the Experience of Time
One of the most compelling aspects of Hockney's digital art is his ability to use technology to examine subjects that have fascinated artists for centuries. Landscape, still life and the passage of time remain central to his work. Digital tools simply allow him to approach these themes differently.
His monumental A Year in Normandie (2020–21), an iPad painting extending approximately 90 metres, records the changing seasons around his former studio in Normandy. Inspired in part by the narrative structure of the Bayeux Tapestry, the work combines contemporary digital techniques with a historical approach to visual storytelling.
The panoramic composition allows viewers to experience the gradual transformation of the landscape, from the emergence of spring to the colours of autumn. Instead of presenting a single moment, Hockney captures the passage of time as a continuous visual experience. This approach reflects a recurring concern throughout his career: the limitations of conventional perspective and the possibilities of representing the world as we actually experience it. His digital practice demonstrates that new technology can offer fresh ways to explore enduring artistic questions, rather than simply producing a different visual style.
David Hockney's Australian Exhibitions in 2026
The continuing international interest in David Hockney's work is reflected in two significant presentations in Australia this year, offering contrasting perspectives on his artistic development and his exploration of visual media. At the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, David Hockney: Portraits in Print runs from 5 September 2026 to 9 May 2027. This collection display explores Hockney's interest in portraiture through prints spanning nearly three decades, offering insights into the people, relationships and cultural environments that shaped his artistic life.
While the exhibition focuses on printmaking rather than digital art, it demonstrates the breadth of Hockney's experimentation with different techniques and his ability to translate his observations into distinctive visual forms. Meanwhile, David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away) opens at Carriageworks in Sydney on 22 October 2026, running until 24 January 2027. This immersive experience transforms Hockney's work into a large-scale digital environment, using 360-degree projections, narration by the artist and an original musical score by Nico Muhly.
The presentation takes audiences through six decades of Hockney's artistic practice, bringing together painting, photography, drawing and digital media. Rather than viewing individual works within conventional gallery spaces, visitors encounter his imagery on an immersive scale, experiencing the relationships between colour, movement, perspective and space in a new way.
The Sydney presentation is particularly relevant to Hockney's engagement with technology. It demonstrates how digital tools can transform not only the creation of art but also the way audiences experience it. Together, these Australian exhibitions highlight the remarkable breadth of his practice, from the considered processes of printmaking to the possibilities of immersive digital presentation.
Why David Hockney's Approach to Technology Still Matters
As digital tools and artificial intelligence continue to transform contemporary culture, Hockney's career offers a valuable perspective on the relationship between technology and artistic creativity. His work demonstrates that adopting a new medium does not require abandoning established artistic principles. Innovation can emerge when an artist applies existing knowledge to unfamiliar tools, discovering possibilities that might otherwise remain unexplored. From photographic collage to iPad painting, Hockney has consistently questioned the idea that there is only one correct way to represent the world.
At Andipa, whose history in Knightsbridge dates to 1967, Hockney's career exemplifies the enduring appeal of artists who continually expand the possibilities of their chosen medium. Ultimately, David Hockney's contribution to digital art lies not simply in his adoption of new technology, but in his ability to use it to help us see the world differently. His work demonstrates that artistic innovation is not defined by the tools an artist uses, but by the imagination, curiosity and vision they bring to them.