David Hockney - David Hockney London Thursday, September 21, 2023 | Phillips

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  • “I don’t use one perspective. I use very many. That is where photography is going, multiple perspectives. This is what digital permits.”
    —David Hockney

    Sparer Chairs is a monumental example of David Hockney’s multidisciplinary practice and his extended exploration into the medium of photography. Executed in 2014 for the British artist’s solo show at L.A. Louver Gallery in Los Angeles, the present lot belongs to Hockney’s later body of work known as “photographic drawings”. Depicting a virtual version of the artist’s Los Angeles studio, this panoramic photograph shifts between abstraction and representation, while extensively exploring the spatial relations between the subject and its surroundings.

     

    Sparer Chairs employs innovative methods of digital production, showcasing Hockney’s extensive engagement with new technologies. By utilising a photogrammetric software to combine hundreds of single snapshots from various viewpoints, the artist created three-dimensional approximations for individual objects, which he then grouped in a notional studio space. By digitally altering the object’s colours, and manually adding highlights and shadows that contradict the principles of traditional lighting, Hockney combined his drawing and painting practices with photography, creating a photographic drawing which appears at once awkwardly hyper-realistic and subtly wrong.

    “The eye is always moving. When my eye moves the perspective alters according to the way I’m looking, so it’s constantly changing; in real life when you are looking at five people there are a thousand perspectives.”
    —David Hockney
    Sparer Chairs further explores Hockney’s ongoing investigation into the notion of perspective, which first began in the early 1980s with his composite polaroids. Introducing a complex depiction of space, the present lot attests to the artist’s efforts to transcend the constraints of conventional one-point perspective by re-inventing the portrayal of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. Infusing the photographic drawing with multiple points of view, Hockney favours reverse perspective to one-point perspective, playing with our habits of sight and encouraging the eye to freely roam across the composition. Sparer Chairs is thus emblematic of Hockney’s artistic endeavours both conceptually and visually, confirming his status as one of the most influential contemporary artists.

    • Provenance

      LA Louver, Los Angeles (label verso of frame)
      Private Collection, UK
      Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

    • 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

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Sparer Chairs

2014
Photographic drawing in colours, printed on wove paper, the full sheet mounted to Dibond (as issued).
107.3 x 175.9 cm (42 1/4 x 69 1/4 in.)
Signed, dated and numbered 24/25 in pencil, printed by the artist, framed.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
£30,000 - 50,000 

Sold for £50,800

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David Hockney

London Auction 21 September 2023