Art News: David Hockney Exhibition at Tate in 2027

Tate will mark what would have been David Hockney's 90th birthday with two exhibitions in London in 2027. A David Hockney exhibition of more than 200 works opens at Tate Britain on 7 October 2027 and runs until 20 February 2028, and in the summer Tate Modern's Turbine Hall will be given over to his designs for the opera. Hockney died at home in London on 11 June 2026, aged 88.

Tate Britain: 7 October 2027 to 20 February 2028

Tate Britain had been working with Hockney on the exhibition through 2025 and into 2026, and after his death it goes ahead as the culmination of that project. Its subject is the people in his life: the family, friends and lovers who appear again and again in his pictures, and the way intimacy, vulnerability and human connection shaped how his art developed.

The show covers seven decades in painting, drawing, printmaking, photography and moving images. It runs from the paintings of queer love and desire he made in the 1960s, through the portraits of his parents, among them My Parents of 1977, which belongs to Tate, to recent works made in the privacy of his home and studio. It also looks at his friendships with other artists and the way they played out in each other's work.

The Turbine Hall: Hockney at the opera

Before that, in the summer, Tate Modern will turn the Turbine Hall into an immersive installation of Hockney's opera designs, brought to life and projected onto vast screens with music. Exact dates have not yet been announced.

Hockney's first stage design was Ubu Roi at the Royal Court Theatre in 1966. While living in London he designed The Rake's Progress for Glyndebourne in 1975 and The Magic Flute in 1978, and in 1981 a French triple bill, Parade, opened at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Later productions included Tristan und Isolde in Los Angeles and Turandot, whose revival in San Francisco in 2017 brought him the San Francisco Opera Medal. He once said he wanted to design operas so that he would have something to look at. Most of his stage designs and studies are held by the David Hockney Foundation.

The idea is not new to London. In 2023 Hockney opened Lightroom at King's Cross with David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away), a projected journey through sixty years of his work with music by Nico Muhly.

The Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. Photo: The wub, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Hockney exhibition tickets

Tickets for the Tate Britain exhibition go on sale in spring 2027, and prices have not yet been confirmed. Tate Members go free with no need to book, and visitors aged 16 to 25 can buy £5 tickets through Tate Collective, which is free to join. As a guide, Monet: Painting Time at Tate Modern, which opens in February 2027, costs £26, or £25 for concessions. Details of the Turbine Hall installation, including whether it will be free, are still to come.

Expect demand to be high. Tate Britain's 2017 Hockney retrospective drew 478,082 visitors, the most for any exhibition in the gallery's history. Almost 35,000 tickets were sold before it opened, and on its final weekend the gallery stayed open until midnight. It will be worth booking as soon as tickets are released.

Hockney in the last two years

The Tate shows follow the largest Hockney exhibition ever staged, David Hockney 25 at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris in 2025, with more than 400 works chosen with the artist and weighted towards his last quarter-century.

The market is paying attention too. On 14 October 2026, in London, Dog Painting 17, his 1995 portrait of his dachshund Stanley asleep on a cushion, becomes the first of his dog paintings ever offered at auction. His auction record, set in New York in 2018, is $90.3 million, for Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures).

Owning a Hockney

Most people who own a Hockney own a print: lithographs, etchings and screenprints made with workshops such as Gemini G.E.L. and Tyler Graphics, and in recent decades editions of his iPad and computer drawings. Telling a signed, numbered edition from a poster or an exhibition reproduction is the first step, and our David Hockney guide explains what to look for and what affects value.

If you own a work by Hockney and are thinking of selling, send us photographs for a free valuation. There is no obligation to sell, and we act for you rather than for the saleroom.

Cover: Tate Britain, Millbank. Photo: Julian Herzog, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.