David Hockney celebrated his 80th birthday last year, but he shows no sign of slowing down.

His vast retrospective has made its way across the globe – currently dropping anchor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for the last time – and he’s now preparing for a new show with the Pace Gallery, set to open in April.

Hockney invited CNN Style into his Los Angeles home studio in the Hollywood Hills, where he’s lived since 1979. His house is a jumble of one and two-storey buildings while his studio was once a paddle tennis court. This vast white space is where he’s created some of his most iconic works, and explored his obsession with depicting space.

‘It’s always space that I’m interested in – pictorial space,’ he says. ‘I’ve always been interested in it, and I still am. That’s what the whole [retrospective show] is about really.’

The Bradford native (or English Angelino, as he calls himself) decamped to California in 1964, where he painted his celebrated swimming pool series, including ‘A Bigger Splash’, and observations of everyday life as a gay man in the Golden State.

‘Swimming pools I always loved,’ he says. ‘I mean, all the wiggly lines they make – if you photograph them, it freezes them, whereas if you use paint, you can have wiggly lines that wiggle.’

David Hockney is on at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York until 25 February 2018

Read next: 12 incredible artists homes you can visit