David Hockney - Moving Focus

Curator Helen Little’s David Hockney: Moving Focus is a unique overview of the artist’s prolific range and activity.

David Hockney has been delighting and challenging audiences for 60 years, and celebrated artworks from across his career are at the center of Tate’s outstanding collection. This book features over 100 of these paintings, prints, drawings, and photographs, helping the reader to understand the artist’s changing sources of inspiration and, crucially, where his work is going.

Beginning in the 1950s, when he made his first steps to becoming a modern artist, the publication charts Hockney’s groundbreaking images of the early 1960s through to his famous depictions of the Los Angeles cityscape. It also looks at Hockney’s much-loved portraits from the 1970s and his discovery of a new way of dealing with time, space, and perspective he called “moving focus,” as well as more recent landscapes and digital images that demonstrate his lifelong preoccupation with pictorial space and how we look at and experience the world around us.

As well as providing a unique overview of Hockney’s prolific range and activity, this book features new texts and responses to his work by established and emerging voices from the worlds of art, design, literature, and performance. Breathing new life into the nexus of Tate’s collection, David Hockney: Moving Focus speaks to the artist’s refusal to conform during periods of uncertainty and polarization as he traversed the boundaries of class, sexuality, and high art, and how his work still surprises, unsettles, and addresses younger generations of viewers.