David Hockney and Hans Ulrich Obrist

From the Room Issue

On the occasion of an exhibition dedicated to David Hockney at the Serpentine Gallery in London in March 2026, Exhibition reveals exclusive excerpts from an ongoing conversation between the British painter and Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, two central figures in contemporary art.

One counts among the most celebrated artists of the contemporary scene; the other is the artistic director of the Serpentine Gallery and arguably the most influential exhibition curator in the world. Unclassifiable visionaries, both share a non-conventional approach to a protean form of art, where a passion for the image runs as a common thread. David Hockney paints, draws, photographs, composes, reveals. Hans Ulrich Obrist documents, orchestrates, writes, experiments, inspires. Each, in their own way, is a custodian of works among the most emblematic of our time, whose influence extends far beyond museums, white cubes, and exhibition spaces.

David Hockney was bound to cross paths with Hans Ulrich Obrist. Artistic director of the Serpentine in London and senior advisor at LUMA Arles, the Zurich-born curator has conceived more than 350 exhibitions, among them Do It and Take Me (I’m Yours), while engaging in dialogue with the leading international artists of his time. It was in the intimacy of David Hockney’s English studio in Yorkshire, in 2008, that their first conversation took place. This would be followed by a series of meetings spanning more than two decades, during which they discussed the threads of art and the world. Ahead of an unprecedented exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in March 2026, Exhibition reveals exclusive excerpts from this conversation. “We are so thrilled that David Hockney has accepted our invitation to present new works at Serpentine North in 2026,” explains Hans Ulrich Obrist. “As a highlight of our Spring/Summer season, the exhibition promises to be a landmark cultural moment.” From the Normandy countryside, where the painter has made his home in recent years, to the blazing Los Angeles of the 1960s, and The Splash, of course, dive into the ever-flowing thoughts shared by David Hockney and Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Friday 10 May 2024. Hockney’s studio, London, England

D.H. In 1960, I was 23, so I remember the 1960s very well. And what I thought was, the 1960s would go on, on and on, like it was. Well, it didn’t really. But I’m really glad I’ve lived when I did, because you could smoke on the underground, you could smoke on the buses, you could smoke on the trains, you could smoke in restaurants. And now, it’s just gone mad. We don’t want anybody smoking anywhere.

H.U.O. The work you did before 16 doesn’t exist, it starts with the earliest work you have, no ?

D.H. Yes, 1953.

H.U.O. And what did you paint when you were 16 ? Self-portraits ?

D.H. I did a self-portrait, I did a painting of a laundrette. People in rooms, with a little gas fire that was all broken, like they were. You used to see them like that. I just painted anything around me.

H.U.O. And did you have books about art at 16 ?

D.H. There were books in the library. Those Skira books, the first ones on Impressionism and things. You had to wash your hands before you could even touch them. And then I was given a Sketch Club prize, a book – three and sixpence it cost – of Piero della Francesca [c. 1415–92]. And I’m sure I still have it somewhere.[…]

H.U.O. I read this book by Fred Kaplan called 1959. He says that a lot of the liberations of the 1960s – sexual liberation, many different liberations – were actually already present in the late 1950s.

D.H. Yes, they probably were. But the pill wasn’t there. It was the pill that did a lot, because then you could fuck anybody, and you wouldn’t get pregnant. But I never, ever thought it would get as bad as it is today.

H.U.O. Talking about the pill, I met this scientist many years ago. He passed away in 2015, Carl Djerassi. He was an Austrian-born Bulgarian pharmaceutical chemist, and he is best known for his contribution to the development of the oral contraceptive pill. He was born in 1923.

D.H. He invented the birth control pill ? He was, what, Austrian ?

H.U.O. He was Austrian-Bulgarian. And more or less at the same time, I also befriended the scientist Albert Hofmann, and he’s the one who discovered LSD. And that was also an important invention for the 1960s, no ?

D.H. Well, LSD and magic mushrooms are two things that don’t affect anything else in your body but your brain. I read this in a quite authoritative book, How to Change Your Mind, and I thought, well, maybe we should try some.

H.U.O. And did you ?

D.H. Yes. This was about six, seven years ago.

H.U.O. Oh, quite recently you tried it ? And what did it do ? Was it interesting ? Because I've never tried it.

D.H. Well, it said you must stay in one place. You shouldn’t move around. You shouldn’t leave home. And we were just looking at four paintings I’d done and the colours became fantastic.

H.U.O. And did it change anything afterwards in how you used colour ?

D.H. When I went into the garden, oh, the intensity of the greens. It was amazing.

H.U.O. But you did it again ?

D.H. In the 1960s it was pretty good, but then you heard about all these bad trips. And they put me off. And now, today, in Silicon Valley, they take these...

H.U.O. Yes, they do micro-dosing.

D.H. Micro-dosing, yes.

Sunday 11 March 2018. Hockney’s studio, Los Angeles, USA

D.H. I’m a smoker. I’m 80. I’ve smoked for 65 years. I don’t know what they’re going on about. Picasso smoked. He died at 91. Monet smoked. He died at 86. Matisse smoked. Renoir smoked. Everybody smoked. Well, I still fucking smoke. And I’m going to go on smoking. And I think they’ve gone mad, actually. All they’ve done is swap tobacco for pills. That’s all they advertise now on television. I don’t want pills. I’ve got something to do. I know that keeps me going. It doesn’t matter; I can smoke, drink, do anything. If you’ve got something to do, you do it. And that’s what I believe. And that’s what I’m doing. And I’m sick and tired of the boring nature of outside now. I mean, it’s just become a bore. New York is a fucking bore. San Francisco is unbelievably boring, I think. We can’t get a hotel in the world where we can smoke in the room, and there’s no place to sit down in public and enjoy a cigarette in New York City. Because technically, you can’t smoke in Central Park. In London, Paris, those are places where you can sit down and smoke a cigarette…

H.U.O. You can’t sit in Central Park on a bench and smoke ?

D.H. No. That’s mean-spirited, I think. Absolutely mean. You’ve got to jog now. You can’t just sit and look at the trees and enjoy a cigarette. You’ve got to be fucking jogging. They’re just wearing out their knees and arms and stuff, aren’t they ? That’s why they’re all having to get new ones now. I’ve still got all my knees, I’ve still got all my elbows. I haven’t had anything done. I don’t know what they’re going on about.

H.U.O. So it’s more exciting in the studio than outside ?

D.H. Yes, this is the most exciting place to me, here.

Saturday 3 December 2016. Hockney’s studio, Los Angeles, USA

D.H. Medicine ? Well I’ll tell you what’s the best medicine – laughter. We have a laugh at least three times a day. And the reason laughter is the best medicine is because when you’re laughing, you have the least fear in your body. That’s why it’s very good to laugh. Doctors don’t tell you this, do they ?

Sunday 2 February 2014. Hockney’s studio, Los Angeles, USA

H.U.O. Do you converse with your sitters while you’re painting them?

D.H. I can’t talk when I’m working. Once I’ve started, I remain silent. But I’m more than happy to chat while they’re making themselves comfortable. I then draw as quickly as possible to catch certain affects – like a slouch, or the boy saying, “Just do it.” They’re drawn very, very quickly. And then painted. Painting is a much slower process. I catch the person. I do catch them.

Tuesday 10 April 2012. Hockney’s studio, London, England

D.H. What we call the art world – of which I’m a part – has also given up on certain things. One of them is depiction: how do you depict the visible world ? People think that one camera can show you reality, but it can’t, really. Once you’ve abandoned depiction, or abandoned image, you’re abandoning the most powerful thing. Images are the most powerful thing.

August 2008. Hockney’s studio, Yorkshire, England

H.U.O. You’ve done a lot of portraits of people in your entourage, friends and wider family, but you were never like Andy Warhol [1928–87], who did commissions of the rich and famous. Why was this ? Was it a conscious decision?

D.H. Yes, it was a decision. I deliberately didn’t want to do any commissioned portraits because it’s not a problem I want to spend time on. Meaning, if you don’t know someone very well, how do you know if you’ve got a likeness ? Andy’s portraits were done as a means of keeping his magazine [Interview] going; it didn’t make any money, so he basically maintained it by painting German industrialists and their wives. Around the same time he was doing those, he did a portrait of me.

H.U.O. What was your relationship with Warhol like ? Friendly ?

D.H. Yes, we got on. I first met him in 1963. When he did the portrait, I did a drawing of him.

[…]

H.U.O. Picasso believed an artist required many different studios. How many studios do you have?

D.H. Well, there’s LA, and in LA I have a studio at the house and then I have a warehouse on Santa Monica Boulevard where we keep everything. I have what I thought was quite a big room there until I saw this one here. I only have a small studio in London and I haven’t really done any ambitious work there for a long time, simply because it’s a hard place to work : too many people want your time and there are too many distractions. I prefer the quiet up here.

H.U.O. Then there’s the house here in Bridlington, too. Is that the beach house ?

D.H. It’s on the promenade, yes.

H.U.O. In a recent interview, you described a beach house where you can watch the sea and the dogs.

D.H. Oh, that was in Malibu. I don’t have that anymore. I lived right on the beach. I had it for ten years and then sold it because the dogs got old and there were too many steps for them. So I have a studio in LA, one in London, and here there are two because there’s one at the house as well. Of course, as you get older and you’re quite productive, you need a lot of space to put things.

[…]

H.U.O. Water has always attracted you, even before you went to LA ? And then, when you did The Splash in 1966, you used photography.

D.H. Of course, because the splash is frozen: photography made us see a splash that way. Remember, that splash was painted by hand and therefore it took time; it was a contradiction of what the actual splash was in terms of time. But by hand-painting it, you can create movement. Only painting can do certain things.

H.U.O. You’ve said in the past that magazines and other elements of popular culture played a role, particularly in your work in the early 1960s. Does that still play a role ?

D.H. It could do. One of the reasons why I went to LA was that I knew there were lots of the male nude there. I’d seen a lot of physique magazines and I’d noticed that most of the photographers were based in Los Angeles. So that was one reason why I went there in 1964. It was sexy.[…]

H.U.O. You’ve always had a strong link to poetry.

D.H. I’ve done a lot of paintings over the years that were inspired by poetry. I haven’t for quite a while, but I still read poetry. There are certain things that I’m not that well-acquainted with – one of them being lyrics of pop songs – so a lot of contemporary poetry I have some difficulty with because I don’t know all the allusions. Pop music, after a certain date, I know nothing about, nor care much about.

H.U.O. Do you listen to music when you paint ?

D.H. Never. Once I start painting, I’m not listening to anything, and I once realised that if I put on some music, after ten minutes I would have forgotten what it was, so I never do. I hate background music. I like music in the foreground. The only place I like to listen to music is in the car.

H.U.O. I always thought there should be a book of your writings.

D.H. Well, I defend myself, that’s all I do.

H.U.O. Do you write every day ?

D.H. No, I write when I get annoyed ! […]

D.H. I remember arguing with Francis Bacon about the word ‘illustration’. He’d use the word ‘illustrator’ as a put-down, as in ‘How’s your illustrating friend Mr Kitaj?’ [painter R.B. Kitaj] I knew Bacon a little bit, not much, but you could have a great argument with him. I’d tell him that some of the best artists were illustrators: Rembrandt, Hogarth.

H.U.O. And what did Bacon say ?

D.H. He’d argue just for the sake of it!I pointed out to him once that I knew a painting in California of some tulips in a vase that was as profound as anything he’d done. It was by [Paul] Cezanne and it was in the Norton Simon Museum. I was just trying to tell him that it wasn’t the subject matter that made images profound but the way they were treated. There was a period in the mid-1970s when Bacon and I both lived in Paris and we’d see each other. Gregory [Evans, Hockney’s then partner] used to go drinking with him.

H.U.O. It’s intriguing to think that, coming from the world of painting, how immersed you’ve been in all these other worlds: theatre, opera, illustration, art history.

D.H. As I said, I’m interested in images; I think that’s the thread always.

[…]

H.U.O. So there’s not really the idea of looking back. It’s more about looking into the future ?

D.H. Yes, I’m not in a retrospective mood.

[…]

D.H. If you think about Andy Warhol’s famous remark, ‘In the future everyone might be famous for 15 minutes’, well, there might be a much darker future where no one is famous – think about that. Because how do you get famous on YouTube ?

[…]

H.U.O. How do you see the role of the artist within this new paradigm with millions of images ? Is the artist a guide ?

D.H. Absolutely, the artist is always a guide. But to be completely honest with you, I don’t really know. I’m watching it carefully; I’m observant.

[…]

H.U.O. We haven’t spoken about the viewer yet. Duchamp said that the viewer does fifty per cent of the work. Would you agree ?

D.H. Yes, kind of. Again, even when we’re looking at a picture, we don’t always see the same thing. It took me a long time, but once you see certain things, you always see them. I did see, because I’d used the camera to draw with, how others had done it. I was amazed. The only artist who’d previously been associated with the camera was perhaps Vermeer. A lot of people were amazed when I said that Caravaggio had used it. But immediately, some Caravaggio scholars wrote to me saying that they agreed, one in particular. I’ll tell you what [art historian] David Freedberg says in his book; I underlined it at the time. He points out that if the history of art and images digressed, art would be a very subservient subject because the power lies with images. I thought ‘Oh, that’s right.’ I think we’re almost at that point now, where a great deal of art doesn’t do that much to people. Whereas images do, and the images aren’t seen as having any connection with art right now. When they go on about how someone can shock with an image, I pointed out that, no, if the images are really shocking, they’d put the people in jail. That’s what happens today. The art world doesn’t make much comment on that. Well, can you really ignore that ? I don’t think so.

H.U.O. This is a very important point because art over the past few years has gained a lot of territory. The market has become very strong, but art hasn’t necessarily won in terms of influence.

D.H. I think that’s an enormous loss, huge, and that’s where we are now. And that’s my argument: how can you have an avant-garde art that’s not dealing with these issues about images ?

[…]

H.U.O. Finally, what would be your advice to a young painter in 2009 ?

D.H. Painting can do an awful lot; it can do a lot more than photography. But, you know, I’m here and I’m busy and I’ve got so much to discover and do. I don’t feel that old. I don’t feel my age. I feel reluctant to give advice to a young artist because, well, I’m still young ! I just hope that I encourage people to look at paintings, and the world, and the landscape. Ultimately, we cannot escape nature, since we’re a part of it.