Yorkshire pride: Six decades of Hockney go on show at the Tate Britain

Tate Britain will put on the "world's most extensive retrospective" of David Hockney's work to celebrate his 80th birthday.

The exhibition, which will open in February 2017, will offer an “unprecedented overview” of the popular artist’s achievements in painting, drawing, print, photography and video.

Ahead of his 80th birthday, the retrospective will show how Hockney stamped his name on the post-modern art scene and continued to challenge the conventions of picture-making for more than half a century.

The 2017 show will be one of the Tate’s biggest exhibitions and the largest retrospective of Hockney’s work for around 30 years, the gallery said.

It will span six decades - from Hockney’s first appearance on the public stage as a student in 1961, to work produced since the Bradford-born artist returned to California in 2013.

It will feature early work such as the Love paintings (1960 and 1961), portraits of family and friends and self-portraits, and range from the sunshine and swimming pools of California to the Yorkshire landscape that caught Hockney’s imagination as a teenager.

Famed for embracing change and new technologies, the chronological overview will aim to show “how the roots of each new direction lay in the work that came before”.

The 78-year-old, who now lives near Bridlington and is widely considered to be Britain’s greatest living artist, said: “It has been a pleasure to revisit works I made decades ago, including some of my earliest paintings. Many of them seem like old friends to me now.

“We’re looking back over a lifetime with this exhibition, and I hope, like me, people will enjoy seeing how the roots of my new and recent work can be seen in the developments over the years.”

After opening in London the exhibition, organised in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou and The Metropolitan Museum, will appear in Paris and New York.

Chris Stephens, head of displays and lead curator at Modern British Art, said Hockney fans could expect to be surprised by next year’s retrospective.

He said the exhibition would include Hockney’s more famous paintings as well as lesser-known or forgotten pieces, and “certainly things that might never have been seen before in Britain”.

He added that deciding which of Hockney’s works to include was “incredibly difficult because he is amazingly prolific and very diverse”.

• The David Hockney retrospective will run from February 9 to May 29 2017 at Tate Britain. A programme of talks and gallery events will accompany the launch. Hockney turns 80 on July 9 2017.