Pop artist, painter of modern life, landscape painter, virtuoso of color, explorer of image and perception: for six decades David Hockney has been known as an artist who repeatedly finds new ways to investigate the world and the possibilities of representing it. In doing so, he consistently creates unforgettable images: free works with a drawn line and integrated text from Swinging London in the 1960s; the famous swimming pool series as a chronicler of the Californian way of life in the 1970s; closely observed portraits and brilliantly colored, oversized landscapes after his later return to his native Yorkshire. Alongside drawings in which he transfers what he sees directly onto paper, there are multi-perspective Polaroid collages that open space into a multitude of detailed views, and iPad drawings in which he captures light with today’s tools, evidence of Hockney’s ongoing spirit of experimentation.

This special edition was newly assembled for TASCHEN’s 40th anniversary from the two volumes of the monograph David Hockney: A Bigger Book: life and work year by year, as a dialogue between Hockney’s own works and the voices of the time, reviews, and the artist’s reflections in a chronological text, supplemented by portrait photographs and exhibition views. Together, it offers a perspective in which, page by page, we witness Hockney’s artistic investigations, how his painting develops, and where he finds the inspirations for his wide-ranging body of work.