David Hockney, who died on Friday at age 88, was an artist enthralled by technological innovation.
In interviews, Hockney would sometimes enthuse about how the 19th-century invention of the metal paint tube had transformed the art world by allowing painters to work easily outside. Throughout his career, he embraced the technological developments of his own times, making art with Polaroid cameras, fax machines, photocopiers, iPads, and iPhones.
Hockney “always had this omnivorous desire to reach people in new ways,” said Mark Grimmer, the co-founder of 59 Studio, an arts company that worked with Hockney on a 2023 immersive show that blew up the artist’s work into large-scale projections. Hockney was “always ahead of the curve” Grimmer added in a 2025 interview: “He would try anything.”
Here are some of the ways that Hockney’s art embraced the latest technology.
Polaroids
Hockney often said in interviews that he considered photography an inferior art form because photos left him feeling “outside” the action, unlike paintings, which could make him feel mentally — and even physically — involved with the reality depicted on canvas.
Then, in the early 1980s, Hockney acquired a Polaroid camera and suddenly found that he could create photographic images that felt truer to life. He achieved that effect by shooting from dozens of angles, then layering the prints to create large, perspective-defying collages of swimming pools, landscapes and people he knew.
Hockney called the technique “new cubism.”
Prominent galleries in the United States and Europe exhibited his montages. Andy Grundberg, an art critic, said in a New York Times review of a 1984 show that with the Polaroid assemblages, Hockney “manages — with customary alacrity — to give his work an originality and authority that is unimpeachable.”
Photocopiers and fax machines
In 1986, Hockney was playing with a friend’s photocopier when he realized that the machine’s ability to resize images and print them on top of each other had artistic potential.
Using a photocopier, Hockney once said, was “the closest I’ve ever come in printing to what it’s like to paint: I can put something down, evaluate it, alter it, revise it, all in a matter of seconds.”
A few years later, he bought a fax machine and began sending his friends drawings of landscapes, pets and portraits. It seemed like a fun and cheap way to distribute his art.
When an English auction house tried to sell some of Hockney’s faxes, the artist complained to the house’s owners — by fax, of course. “The whole point of the faxes I made in 1989 is that they were given away,” Hockney scrawled on the fax paper. “They cannot be sold,” he added: “How would I be paid?”
Jennifer Farrell, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which owns around two dozen Hockney faxes, said in a 2025 interview that with those faxed pieces Hockney was “broadening the concept of art, challenging the idea of originality and asking questions about the value of art.”
iPhones and iPads
After getting an iPhone in 2008, Hockney downloaded a painting and drawing app called Brushes. Soon, he was using it to paint sunrises and floral still lifes, which he’d message to friends.
Hockney drew so many images on that iPhone, he told The New York Times in a 2009 interview, that he filled up its memory and had to buy a second just to keep sketching.
In 2010, he began drawing on an iPad, producing images of landscapes and celebrity friends that he exhibited in museum shows. A major 2024 Hockney retrospective at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris included a room featuring 220 iPad works, called “Four Years in Normandy” (2019-23), that depicted the French countryside changing through the seasons.
Immersive art
Hockney embraced digital technology on a huge scale when he made “Bigger & Closer (Not Smaller & Further Away)” — a 2023 immersive show in which his most famous paintings were beamed onto the walls of a London arts venue, surrounding and engulfing viewers.
At times during the almost hourlong show, Hockney’s animated brushstrokes would appear on the walls one stroke at a time until a painting became whole.
Grimmer, who helped developed the spectacle, recalled Hockney saying that he had long tried to immerse audiences in his paintings, often by using ever bigger canvases. With this technology, Hockney said he could go further and “wrap the paintings around the viewer.”
As they worked on the project, Grimmer added, Hockney said he was happy to try all new technologies except one: virtual reality. “We talked about doing a version of the show in a headset,” Grimmer said, “but David said it’d seal the viewer off. He was much more interested in the communal experience. I remember him saying, ‘V.R. is only good for pornography’!”
Communal joy was at the heart of Hockney’s use of technology, Grimmer added. The artist didn’t just “find new ways of making pictures,” Grimmer said: “He found new ways of sharing them with people.”
