Shortly after moving to California, in the mid-1960s, David Hockney began his working relationship with master printer Kenneth Tyler. Working with Tyler in all four of his workshops, Hockney found a joyous freedom in the variety of mark-making he could develop and explore through painting, photography and experimental lithography. It was with Tyler that Hockney embarked on his ambitious Moving Focus series, where he dove into his enduring concern with the construction of images, the complexities of space, and the assembly of multiple perspectives. The result was a body of work which remains his largest and most pioneering series of colour lithographs, comprising 29 prints of interior views and chairs, exterior views of a Mexican hotel, and portraits of some of his most well-known sitters including Celia Birtwell and Gregory Evans.
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, with works such as The artist's dining room, rue de la Boeti (1919), for Moving Focus, Hockney embraced a pictorial structure that could accommodate multiple viewpoints and perspectives as well as time and movement. The series combines the Renaissance tradition of fixed-viewpoint painting, visible in many of The Last Supper scenes from the era, with the Eastern aesthetic of multiple narratives within the same picture.
Capturing his host’s intimate homelife, for Tyler Dining Room, Hockney uses reverse perspective, placing the smaller end of the table closer to the viewer in the foreground of the composition, with the wider side at the back of the picture space. By reversing the traditional vanishing point, Hockney exploits the fluctuations of deep and shallow space, making room in the foreground to directly involve the viewer. The artist balances the darker wooden tabletop and wish-bone chairs with the large Cubist painting hung on the left-hand wall. Set against the pastel blues and pinks of the classic 1970s interior design, Hockney juxtaposes the old and new, opening a cross generational narrative for the scene. Combining these elements, the viewer is drawn into the space to be a part of the conversation: looking at the world through multiple lenses from the safety of your own home.
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 Tyler Dining Room, we are seeing not only what is in front of us, but all of the dining spaces that we have ever seen.
來源
倫敦Waddington Graphics畫廊 現藏者於1985/6年直接購自上述來源
文學
Tyler Graphics 278 Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo 261
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.