Kaws Chair

The art of David Hockney is always engaging in its pleasant ambiguities: his prints, drawings and paintings are warm but somehow aloof; filled with light yet often dark and brooding in subject; simple, frank and mundane, but also ethereal and complex. The artist’s stature in the contemporary art world is such that, in a 2011 survey of one thousand British painters and sculptors, he was named the most influential British artist of all time.

Hockney grew up in Bradford, in the northern English county of Yorkshire, studying at the Bradford School of Art from 1953 to ’57, and at the Royal College of Art in London from 1959 to 1962. Though he was educated in art at a time when abstraction dominated the field, Hockney stuck resolutely to figurative painting and drawing.

Hockney's early paintings suggest a search for a style, veering from Expressionism to a grotesquerie suggestive of James Ensor. But Hockney found himself almost the moment he arrived in Los Angeles, in 1963. The move from the gray and rainy Britain to a world of bright sunshine and sparkling water brought Hockney a sense of freedom and an artistic epiphany. He would spend most of the next five years in L.A., painting luminous pictures, such as A Bigger Splash (1967), of things that made him happy: swimming pools, manicured lawns, palm trees, stucco buildings and luxuries like shower stalls. Hockney also painted people, almost always his friends. His California portraits such as Beverly Hills Housewife (1966) are considered to be his finest work. They are at once grandly scaled, intimate and poetic.

In the 1970s, Hockney moved back to Britain and spent much of his time on photography and printmaking. He returned to painting in the 1980s, and to subjects like still lifes, seascapes and portraits. Hockney has always been fascinated by the use of technology in art — he’s credited with inventing the technique of joining Polaroid photos in a collage to form a panoramic picture — and has been using the Brush app to paint on an iPad. Because he is prolific and works in a wide range of mediums, Hockney’s art is available at many price points. His consistently striking and provocative work should have a place in any comprehensive collection of contemporary art.

Find original David Hockney art on 1stDibs.

Used to refer to a time rather than an aesthetic, Contemporary art generally describes pieces created after 1970 or being made by living artists anywhere in the world. This immediacy means it encompasses art responding to the present moment through diverse subjects, media and themes. Contemporary painting, sculpture, photography, performance, digital art, video and more frequently includes work that is attempting to reshape current ideas about what art can be, from Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s use of candy to memorialize a lover he lost to AIDS-related complications to Jenny Holzer’s ongoing “Truisms,” a Conceptual series that sees provocative messages printed on billboards, T-shirts, benches and other public places that exist outside of formal exhibitions and the conventional “white cube” of galleries.

Contemporary art has been pushing the boundaries of creative expression for years. Its disruption of the traditional concepts of art are often aiming to engage viewers in complex questions about identity, society and culture. In the latter part of the 20th century, contemporary movements included Land art, in which artists like Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer create large-scale, site-specific sculptures, installations and other works in soil and bodies of water; Sound art, with artists such as Christian Marclay and Susan Philipsz centering art on sonic experiences; and New Media art, in which mass media and digital culture inform the work of artists such as Nam June Paik and Rafaël Rozendaal.

The first decades of the 21st century have seen the growth of Contemporary African art, the revival of figurative painting, the emergence of street art and the rise of NFTs, unique digital artworks that are powered by blockchain technology.

Major Contemporary artists practicing now include Ai Weiwei, Cecily Brown, David Hockney, Yayoi Kusama, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami and Kara Walker.

Find a collection of Contemporary prints, photography, paintings, sculptures and other art on 1stDibs.

As part of the wall decor in your living room, dining room or elsewhere, original still-life prints and other still-life wall art can look sophisticated alongside your well-curated decorative objects and can help set the mood in a space.

Still-life art, which includes work produced in media such as painting, photography, video and more, is a popular genre in Western art. However, the depiction of still life in color goes back to Ancient Egypt, where paintings on the interior walls of tombs portrayed the objects — such as food — that a person would take into the afterlife. Ancient Greek and Roman mosaics and pottery also often depicted food. Indeed, popular still-life prints often feature food, flowers or man-made objects. By definition, still-life art represents anything that is considered inanimate.

During the Middle Ages, the still life genre was adapted by artists who illustrated religious manuscripts. A common theme of these still-life paintings is the reminder that life is fleeting. This is especially true of vanitas, a kind of still life with roots in the Netherlands during the 17th century, which was built on themes such as death and decay and featured skulls and objects such as rotten fruit. In northern Europe during the 1600s, painters consulted botanical texts to accurately depict the flowers that were the subject of their work.

While early examples were primarily figurative, you can find still lifes that belong to different schools and styles of painting and printmaking, such as Cubism, Impressionism and contemporary art.

Leonardo da Vinci’s penchant for observing phenomena in nature and filling notebooks with drawings and notes helped him improve as an artist of still-life paintings. Vincent van Gogh, an artist who made a couple of the most expensive paintings ever sold, carried out rich experiments with color over the course of painting hundreds of still lifes, and we can argue that Campbell’s Soup Cans (1961–62) by Andy Warhol counts as still-life art.

Still-life art enthusiasts and collectors of Warhol prints have lots of reasons to love the cultural icon — when Warhol brought the image of a Campbell’s soup can out of the supermarket and into the studio, in 1961, he secured his legacy as a radical contemporary artist. After Warhol painted the soup cans, he realized that he could more readily achieve the mass-produced aesthetic he was seeking with silkscreens, also called screen-prints, and he began experimenting with silkscreening on canvas. He used the technique to print paintings of Coke bottles and dollar bills (both in 1962), as well as his treasured Brillo box sculptures (1964).  

When shopping for a still-life print, think about how it makes you feel and how the artist chose to represent its subject. When buying any art for your home, choose pieces that you connect with. If you’re shopping online, read the description of the work to learn about the artist and check the price and shipping information. Make sure that the works you choose complement or relate to your overall theme and furniture style. Artwork can either fit into your room’s color scheme or serve as an accent piece. Introduce new textures to a space by choosing an oil still-life painting.

On 1stDibs, the collection of still-life prints and other still-life wall art includes works by Jonas Wood, Alex Katz, Nina Tsoriti and many more.