I was the auctioneer who sold a Hockney for a record-breaking $90.3m

David Hockney’s life coincided with, and in many ways helped to lead, an explosion of academic and commercial interest in contemporary art. His acute fascination with, and study of, the way we look found broad international appeal on so many different levels with a universality few artists have achieved. His thirst for the new electrified audiences at each exhibition, and the market response that followed, created a global reach virtually unmatched by any other artist.

From humble beginnings in Bradford, his work now hangs in major museums and private collections throughout the world, from America to China. At Sotheby’s in 2005, I was honoured to be able to steward his 1963 masterpiece, Seated woman being served tea by standing companion to Museum of Modern Art, New York, for £1,800,000 – a new world record at the time. The painting came at the end of a period when, as a student, he was exploring his own place in the world, when his sexuality was still essentially censored. The charm of his art made everyone pay attention to his message and helped to move society forward just a little. Thirteen years later, in my final auction at Christie’s in November 2018, we set the world record price for any living artist of $90.3 million (£67m at the time) for Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972), which now resides in the Yageo Foundation in Taiwan.

Indeed, the greatest technological minds of our time have been captivated by Hockney’s investigations into the science of seeing. The auction of the late co-founder of Microsoft, Paul Allen, in 2022 showed the American collector had assembled an extraordinary group of works spanning Hockney’s career and set new benchmarks for the Yorkshire landscapes, originally unveiled at the Royal Academy in 2012, achieving as much as $23m (£20.4m) in that auction.

In the same exhibition, well into his 70s Hockney showed his tireless engagement with new media through his iPad drawings. During the exhibition those pieces, executed in editions of 25, could have been purchased for around £12,500 and have since made as much as $2m. He had made the work broadly available and yet they still became so expensive.

Few artists have attracted such a diverse audience. Collectors across the world have engaged with Hockney’s work at every level, from prints, to the groundbreaking photographic collages of the 1980s, challenging conventional ideas of perspective to the iPad drawings and digital works that would follow, to the major paintings that have achieved some of the highest prices by any living artist.

Hockney’s boundless curiosity and enjoyment of the visual world, his effortless study of its construction and his sheer adoration of the act of painting were on view at his last exhibitions at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, and the Serpentine Gallery, London, where a video of him painting in his wheelchair with his withering hands showed the utter joy he took when he moved back to study what he had just done. The market, I am sure, will continue to do the same as his legacy is interrogated through all of those layers of 70 years of work and we continue to discover new elements of his unique vision.

Francis Outred is one of the world’s leading auctioneers, having spent the past 20 years working for Sotheby’s and Christie’s

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Photograph by Jonathan Wilkinson, David Hockney