An Image of Celia, State II is among the most ambitious and technically complex portraits David Hockney produced during the 1980s. Created as part of the important Moving Focus series in collaboration with master printer Kenneth Tyler at Tyler Graphics, the work brings together lithography, collage and an artist-designed sculptural frame to challenge the conventional idea of the print as a flat, rectangular image. The composition was produced from twenty aluminum lithographic plates on TGL handmade papers, while the irregular white-lacquered frame follows and extends the architecture of the image itself.

The sitter is Celia Birtwell, Hockney’s close friend and one of the most enduring subjects of his career. Rather than presenting her from a single fixed viewpoint, Hockney fragments Celia, her chair and the surrounding space into overlapping planes. Her body seems simultaneously frontal, profile and oblique, while the brilliant blues, reds and greens compete with passages of black and patterned paper. The debt to Picasso and Cubism is deliberate: Hockney was increasingly interested in the possibility of representing time and multiple acts of looking within a single image, rejecting the frozen perspective inherited from photography and Renaissance perspective. His thinking about Picasso during this period centered precisely on the possibility of seeing different sides of an object or body as one’s eye moves around it.

Yet the work is also unusually self-referential. Elements derived from Hockney’s earlier images—including Red Celia, Amaryllis in Vase and Afternoon Swimming—are incorporated into the composition, effectively turning the portrait into a collage of Hockney’s own visual history. The distinction between drawing, printmaking and collage consequently becomes deliberately unstable: Celia is not simply depicted but constructed from accumulated images and different moments of seeing.

With an edition of only 10 impressions, plus six artist’s proofs, State II is exceptionally rare. Its monumental scale and elaborate construction distinguish it from the more conventionally formatted editions within Moving Focus. The result is as much an object as a print—a particularly successful expression of Hockney’s mid-1980s attempt to liberate pictorial space from a single viewpoint and one of the most sophisticated printed portraits of Celia Birtwell in his oeuvre.