In the Mood for Love: Hockney in London 1960-63

Exhibited together for the first time, these early paintings embellished with love hearts,  graphic text, suggestive shapes and depictions of friends and lovers reveal David Hockney’s precocious talent during the most formative chapter of his career. 

In 1959, Hockney moved from Bradford to begin his studies at the Royal College of Art,  London, where he was determined to experience the capital’s postwar bohemian culture  as well as absorb the modern and contemporary art in its museums and galleries. The  exhibition focuses on this period before Hockney relocated to the United States at the end  of 1963 and reveals his discovery of an unmistakably personal style of painting that would  establish him as the most important artist of his generation.