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David Hockney: Biography
David Hockney was born in 1937 at Bradford. Between 1953-57 he studied at the Bradford School of Art. A conscientious objector, he spent his national service working in a hospital until 1959. from 1959-62 he studied at the Royal College of Art, London. Here he met R.B. Kitaj and other founders of British pop art and saw American abstract expressionist paintings. From 1960 he began showing in the "Young Contemporaries" exhibitions at the RBA Galleries and read the Complete Works of Walt Whitman. By 1961 he had done his first "Tea Paintings" and "Love Paintings", painted compositions consisting of consumer goods images and psychograms. More than any others, these pictures showed his proximity to pop art. In 1961 he was represented at the Paris Biennale and awarded at the Guiness Award for Etching. He taught at Maidstone College in 1962. In 1963 he traveled to Egypt and Los Angeles, where he met Henry Geldzahler., Andy Warhol and Dennis Hopper. He did his first paintings of showers at this time and developed his "Californian" style. From 1963-64 he taught at the University of Iowa. In 1964, he settled in Los Angeles, painted his first swimming pool pictures and made his first polaroids. From 1965-67 he held his teaching posts at the University of Colorado and University of California, Berkeley. He had a retrospective exhibition in London in 1970, also shown at the Hanover and Rotterdam. Between 1973-75 he lived in Paris. In 1976 he returned to Los Angeles and worked intensively with photography. In 1978 he designed the d�cor for Mozart's "The Magic Flute", produced at the Glyndebourne Festival, and in 1980 he developed a programme for the Metropolitan Opera with works by Satie, Poulenc, Ravel and Stravinsky. In 1981 he traveled to China, following which his "China Diary" was published by Thames and Hudson. He designed covers for Vogue in 1984 and 1985, the set for Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde" at the Los Angeles Music Center in 1986/87, and carpet patterns for a company in 1988.
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