David Hockney - Editions & Works on Paper New York Tuesday, October 17, 2017 | Phillips

Editions & Works on Paper

New York Auction 17 October 2017

  • Literature

    Tyler Graphics 272
    Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo 266

  • Catalogue Essay

    The synaesthetic experience of Hockney’s Amaryllis in Vase: the colour, vibration and scent, pours out of the picture and envelops the viewer. Luscious, jewel-toned hues echo the joyous freedom and variety of mark-making that Hockney explored during the 1980s in painting, photography, and experimental lithography at the studio of Kenneth Tyler in California. It was with Tyler that Hockney embarked upon his ambitious Moving Focus series exploring his enduring concern with the construction of images, the complexities of space and the assembly of multiple perspectives.

    For Hockney, single-point perspective is a limited, constrictive way of communicating our experience of the world around us, which he likens to “looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed Cyclops - for a split second.” Drawing inspiration from the Cubism of Picasso’s 1980 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Hockney embraced a pictorial structure that could accommodate multiple viewpoints and perspectives as well as time and movement.

    For Amaryllis in Vase, Hockney uses reverse perspective, placing the shorter end of the table closer to the viewer in the foreground of the composition, with the longer side at the back of the picture space. By reversing the traditional vanishing point, Hockney exploits the fluctuations of deep and shallow space, pushing everything into the foreground and directly involving the viewer. The hazy chequerboard background (reminiscent of Persian miniature paintings) bulges and recedes in optical illusion as our eye flits across the surface. The wallpaper appears to melt into the flowers rather than sitting passively behind them and as the table tilts forwards, the eye calculates the possibility of the vase smashing onto the floor.
    Hockney recognises that we see both geometrically and psychologically and uses that knowledge to create images of sensuous line and colour, through which the eye dances and where edges of viewpoints fold into and across each other. Hockney compared the human experience of looking as a matter of layering, of understanding the present by comparing it with the past - layer upon layer. When we look at his Amaryllis in Vase we are seeing not only what is in front of us, but all of the vases of flowers that we have ever seen.

  • Artist Biography

    David Hockney

    David Hockney (b. 1937) is one of the most well-known and celebrated artists of the
    20th and 21st centuries. He works across many mediums, including painting, collage,
    and more recently digitally, by creating print series on iPads. His works show semi-
    abstract representations of domestic life, human relationships, floral, fauna, and the
    changing of seasons.

    Hockney has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Royal
    Academy of Arts in London, and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, among many
    other institutions. On the secondary market, his work has sold for more than $90
    million.

     
    View More Works

43

David Hockney

Amaryllis in Vase, from Moving Focus

1985
Lithograph in colors, on TGL handmade paper, with full margins.
I. 46 x 32 1/2 in. (116.8 x 82.6 cm)
S. 50 x 36 in. (127 x 91.4 cm)
Signed, dated and numbered 51/80 in pencil (there were also 16 artist's proofs), published by Tyler Graphics Ltd., Bedford, New York (with their blindstamp), framed.

Estimate
$50,000 - 70,000 

Sold for $100,000

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Editions & Works on Paper

New York Auction 17 October 2017