David Hockney — No. 516 (2010)

David Hockney (b. 1937) stands among the defining figures of postwar and contemporary art, celebrated for a practice that moves fluently between painting, photography, stage design and—crucially—digital image-making. In 2010, his iPad drawings marked a decisive cultural shift: not a novelty, but a museum-grade extension of the artist’s lifelong enquiry into perception, colour, and immediacy. No. 516 belongs to this landmark digital corpus and accompanies the limited-edition Taschen volume A Bigger Book, the monumental publication that frames Hockney’s visual journey as both archive and artwork.

Depicting a bouquet arranged in a terracotta vessel—green foliage and closed buds punctuated by a vivid pink rose, a carnation, and a white sweet pea—the composition echoes the still-life tradition while asserting an unmistakably contemporary language. Hockney does not attempt to mimic oil paint; instead he exploits the iPad’s native virtues: crisp contours, layered translucencies, and bold chromatic fields that read as both painterly and unapologetically digital. The work is numbered and signed by the artist on the front, anchoring its authenticity and positioning it within the most sought-after segment of his editioned output from this period.

Demand for Hockney’s iPad works—particularly those tied to A Bigger Book—has strengthened on the secondary market, with comparable examples such as Untitled No. 516 achieving £49,020 at Phillips, London, underscoring the category’s investment attention. Supported by an institutional reputation shaped by exhibitions at Tate Britain, Centre Pompidou, MoMA and the Royal Academy, this edition offers collectors a concise, historically resonant entry into one of the most influential transitions in modern artistic practice: from analog plein air to digitally mediated seeing, distilled into a rigorously limited, signed work.