Article | David Hockneys All Seeing Eye Editions Auction London September 2026
David Hockney’s All-Seeing Eye
Spanning subject matter, media, and ways of seeing, Hockney’s vision knew no bounds.
DAVID HOCKNEY, Self-Portrait in My Living Room, from David Hockney - 220 for 2020: Art Edition B, 2019/2021. David Hockney.
When we first encounter a work by David Hockney, it is the compelling imagery that immediately strikes us, be it a vibrant swimming pool, a landscape, an interior, or even one of his beloved dachshunds. But what lies beneath the surface is a practice deeply interested in perception itself. His lifelong interrogation of how we see — and how we experience time and space — is embodied across his works, themselves often mimicking how our eyes dart, glance, and linger across a picture plane over time.
These ideas are top of mind as Phillips presents our fifth installment of the highly anticipated David Hockney sale in London with a selection of works that show just how widely the artist saw — beginning with a staggering and immersive panoramic experience.
Any art lover knows that delightful feeling of seeing something new in a work once it’s been pointed out to us. This experience imparts a memory that impacts how we see things moving forward. After all, memory dictates what we perceive, and our perception dictates what we remember. In Autour de la maison, été, scale becomes a stage for the mechanics of memory itself. Spanning an extraordinary twelve meters across a single continuous sheet — here presented across eight slides — Hockey’s largest editioned print transforms his memory of a bucolic Normandy landscape into an immersive spatial narrative, directly echoing his transformative 1983 encounter with 17th-century Qing dynasty handscrolls at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Just as Wang Hui spliced observation with imagined terrain to chart an emperor’s journey, Hockney leverages the fluid immediacy of the iPad to synthesize the tradition of en plein air observation with a deeply personal geography. Hockney reimagines the traditional landscape as an unfolding temporal sequence, compelling the viewer to physically walk alongside his gaze.
"In art, new ways of seeing mean new ways of feeling; you can't divorce the two, as, we are now aware, you cannot have time without space and space without time."
—David Hockney
At the core of Hockney’s Moving Focus series lies a fierce rejection of single-point perspective — what the artist dismissed as the narrow, fixed view of a “paralysed Cyclops.” Born from his fascination with Picasso and Cubism and a technical collaboration with master printer Kenneth Tyler, this milestone body of lithographs seeks to reconstruct how we actually inhabit space over time.
In An Image of Gregory, Hockney fragments both subject and frame, depicting his long-time muse across split sheets to capture the simultaneous profile, glance, and gestures of an extended encounter. In contrast, Tyler Dining Room turns its lens onto interior architecture, deploying reverse perspective to open the room and draw the viewer directly into the foreground. These works may capture psychological depth or an intimate space, but what sets them apart is how they depict the essence of sight itself.
Ultimately, the sun-drenched, rippling surfaces of Hockney’s beloved Los Angeles swimming pools are a perfect subject for the artists obsession with shifting visual experiences. For Hockney, the idyllic swimming pools of Southern California quickly evolved from a symbol of American utopian freedom into an ultimate laboratory for testing the workings of perception. In the two highly characteristic lithographs on offer here — each made in collaboration with Kenneth Tyler, Hockney directly confronts the paradox of translating fluid, shifting light onto a flat matrix.
Through empty, diagonal diving boards that slice across the compositions, he anchors the eye before dousing it in a shimmering dance of marks and washes. Where the Moving Focus works fragment spatial perspective across time, these prints attempt to freeze the fleeting refractivity of a single element. Together, they demonstrate how Hockney’s works repeatedly subvert static representation, turning his classic subjects, revisited over time, into sites of endless visual discovery.
"I believe that the very process of looking can make a thing beautiful."
—David Hockney
Beyond the works highlighted here, the curiosity of Hockney’s vision reverberates across the broader landscape of his printmaking. For a glimpse, look no further than our complete catalogue and let your own eye do some wandering — you might just learn to see everything differently.
