With iPhones and Faxes, David Hockney Embraced Tech

David Hockney, who died on Thursday 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.”