Number One Chair
from Moving Focus

Medium: Lithograph and etching in colors on HMP hand-made paper
Year: 1985-1986
Sheet: 22 1/4 x 18 7/8 inches (56.5 x 47.9 cm)
Edition: 60
Artist’s Proofs: 16
Publisher: Tyler Graphics, Mount Kisco
Literature: Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (287)

Signed, dated and numbered in pencil with the publisher’s blindstamp

In Number One Chair, an ordinary piece of furniture is transformed into a subject worthy of deep observation. Completed between the years of 1985 and 1986, Hockney portrays a colorful, centrally positioned wicker armchair that dominates the composition. Any extraneous domestic detail shrinks into a muted background. Hockney pays close attention to the armchair’s woven wicker patterns, depicting their texture in vibrant hues of orange and yellow. Resting on the chair is a bright pink, overstuffed floral cushion. The armchair is cosy, comforting, and lived in.

Empty chairs, heavy with absence, are a recurring motif in Hockney’s work. They function as narrative devices, prompting us to imagine their missing occupant. By frustrating our desire for a person, or sitter, Hockney subverts the traditional hierarchical importance of the figure in portraiture. Instead, Hockey’s armchair is the subject. It is through close observation of this armchair that a world of memories, intimate domesticity, and eccentricity is revealed to us.

Hockney also uses his chairs to play with perspective and explore the ever-shifting mechanisms of seeing. Hockney’s Number One Chair sits on a kaleidoscopic jigsaw of wooden floorboards. The contrasting vertical and horizontal lines of the floorboards create multiple viewpoints. The legs of the chair itself are impossibly splayed out and cast shadows in opposite directions. The shadows also give the illusion of feet, adding to the work’s dynamic sense of movement.

Hockney was deeply inspired by the works of Pablo Picasso, and Number One Chair can be seen in this way as a homage to Cubism. For Hockney, Cubism is a way of intensely looking and heightening the psychological content of his work. In a 1983 interview, Hockney was asked about a Cubist painting by Picasso he had recently bought called The Painter and His Model (1965). Hockney saw the work as being about a man realizing that “when he looks hard, he sees many, many things, different ways of looking.” In Number One Chair, Hockney adopts these “different ways of looking”, amalgamating various viewpoint and perspectives all at once.

“When I’m working, I feel like Picasso, I feel I’m 30.”

Number One Chair is part of Hockney’s wider Moving Focus series of 1984-86, his largest and most ambitious print collective to date. Born out of his relocation to California, Hockney crossed paths with master printer Kenneth Tyler, immediately sparking a creative camaraderie that united Tyler’s unmatched technical prowess with Hockney’s insatiable artistic appetite. Typified by vibrant color, ambitious large-scale formats and multi-layered vantage points, Hockney is in constant dialogue with the medium, unabashedly shifting and experimenting with the visual language, and in doing so, is able to transform his subjects into a fantastical other-world of color and vision.

Source: Phillips

 Auction Results

DAVID HOCKNEY (B. 1937)
Number One Chair, from Moving Focus, 1985-1986
Lithograph and etching in colors on HMP handmade paper
Signed and dated in pencil, numbered 59⁄60

Heritage Auctions: 26 October 2022
USD 32,500