David Hockney Painting Fetches £2.4m in First Major Auction Since Artist’s Death

Spotlight David Hockney’s Enthusiasm for Living Arthur Lubow

David Hockney’s The Only One with Waves (1991) sold for £2.42 million at Phillips’ Modern & Contemporary Art sale in London on 26 June, marking the first major auction house sale of the artist’s work since his death earlier this month. The result landed near the upper end of the work’s £1.8 million–£2.5 million estimate, suggesting a market driven by sustained demand.

Painted in Malibu in 1991, The Only One with Waves belongs to a transitional period in Hockney’s career. Moving beyond the iconic California pool paintings that established his international reputation in the 1960s and 1970s, the work explores the Pacific coastline through an experimental visual language.

Drawing on the flattened perspectives of his opera set designs, Hockney renders breaking waves as rhythmic, abbreviated brushstrokes, combining Fauvist colour with Cubist-inspired fragmentation. The painting anticipates the increasingly ambitious landscape works that would occupy much of the following decade.

The auction came amid renewed attention to Hockney’s market following his death on 11 June. In the 48 hours that followed, the private sales platform MyArtBroker reported a 1,200% increase in sales and valuation enquiries for the artist’s work.

Yet the Phillips result suggests that increased interest has not immediately translated into inflated auction prices. Instead, bidding reflected confidence in the market’s existing price structure, with collectors paying established value rather than chasing a posthumous premium.

That confidence was also evident at Art Basel, where Hockney’s work featured prominently across the fair, including presentations by Pace and Galerie Lelong & Co. Chicago gallery GRAY sold Studio Interior #2 (2014) for $8.5 million, while Annely Juda Fine Art presented the artist’s final birthday painting, Delphiniums on My Garden Table, July 2025, with a reported $12 million price tag.

Hockney remains one of the most valuable artists of his generation, with his auction record standing at $90.3 million, set by Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972) at Christie’s in 2018. While his iconic pools and major double portraits occupy the top tier of the market—and recent large-scale interiors have commanded asking prices of $8 million to $12 million—the £2.42 million result for The Only One with Waves points to sustained demand for his 1990s practice.