WORK IN PROGRESS

 

David Hockney, renowned for his paintings and prints, has long explored photography, a central element of his artistic practice since the 1960s. Hockney’s later works, including digital collages and photographic drawings, reflect a blend of advanced technology and manual artistry, demonstrating his commitment to exploring the complexities of perception in art. Below, read more about his work in this medium.

 

‘Perspective takes away the body of the viewer. You have a fixed point, you have no movement; in short, you are not there really. That is the problem… For something to be seen, it has to be looked at by somebody and any true and real depiction should be an account of the experience of that looking.”

 

 

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Introduction

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This redefined interest in photography is later explored in Hockney’s investigative text: Secret Knowledge, Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (2001). Hockney’s text explores the history of perspective in art while comparing his own practices with photography to those of the old masters. He posits that many master painters used tools like the camera obscura, camera lucida and mirrors to achieve a hyper-realistic painting style.

Camera obscura is a natural phenomenon whereby a beam of light is shone through a tiny hole into a dark room, resulting in an inverse projection of what can be seen beyond the hole, onto the opposite inner wall. The camera lucida is the optical device that projects and inverts this image onto the artist’s drawing surface, so that the image can be traced. Hockney argues that these images were essentially staged, using light and a deep understanding of composition, akin to his own manipulation of spatial perception. Hockney’s text expands on this, comparing his own photographic works to these ancient techniques.

In line with his spatial and perspectival pursuits, Hockney’s digital exploration follows two primary paths – photographic collages and photographic drawings. His ongoing effort to render convincing, spatially coherent perspectives is undoubtedly rooted in the old master tradition.

 

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2025 Auction Results

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The Scrabble Players, 2015

Seoul Auction: 18 February 2025
Estimated: KRW 80,000,000 – 150,000,000
KRW 94,400,000 / USD 65,515

DAVID HOCKNEY (b.1937)
The Scrabble Players, 2015
Photographic drawing printed on paper mounted on Dibond
Signed, dated and numbered on the recto

The Red Table, 2014

K Auction Seoul: 19 February 2025
Estimated: KRW 54,000,000 – 120,000,000
KRW 64,400,000 / USD 44,630

DAVID HOCKNEY (b.1937)
The Red Table, 2014
Photographic drawing print
Signed, dated and numbered on the front

My Second Expedition to the Yosemite Valley, 1982

Christie’s New-York: 16 April 2025
Estimated: USD 10,000 – 15,000
USD 9,450

DAVID HOCKNEY (B. 1937)
My Second Expedition to the Yosemite Valley, 1982
Photocollage in coupler prints in colors, mounted to green board
Sheet: 49 7/8 x 55 3/4 inches (126.7 x 141.6 cm)
Signed, titled, dated and numbered ‘7’ in white ink
(the edition was ten)

 

 

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2024 Auction Results

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Gregory Watching the Snow Fall, Kyoto, Feb 21st, 1983

LA Modern: 8 March 2024
Estimated: USD 20,000 – 30,000
USD 15,120

 

 

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2023 Auction Results

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Reading in the Studio, 2015

 

 

 

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Photographic Drawings (2015/2018)

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Photographic Drawings might be David Hockney’s most technical explorations in photography. Departing from his joiners and his photographic collages, these new works employ complex digital technologies to generate advanced compositions.

Akin to his earlier experiments, David Hockney meticulously photographs and maps together hundreds of images to render a single scene. Hockney and his studio assistant Jonathan Wilkinson discovered the photogrammetric software Agisoft Photoscan in 2017. Prior to this, their renditions were cruder, and details were more manually rendered and pasted into the works. Agisoft is capable of stitching hundreds of images together to produce “3-D approximation”. Hockney feeds the images into the software and waits for hours for it to churn through them. The result: an uncanny rendition of a familiar space. Hockney then uses the outcome as a backdrop for the manipulation that follows.

By digitally altering colors, and manually adding highlights and shadows that contradict the principles of traditional lighting, Hockney combines his drawing and painting practices with photography, creating a photographic drawing which appears at once awkwardly hyper-realistic and subtly wrong. This further explores Hockney’s ongoing investigation into the notion of perspective 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 favors reverse perspective to one-point perspective, playing with our habits of sight and encouraging the eye to freely roam across the composition.

 

 

 

Seven Trollies, Six and a Half Stools, Six Portraits, Eleven Paintings, and Two Curtains, 2018

DAVID HOCKNEY
Seven Trollies, Six and a Half Stools, Six Portraits, Eleven Paintings, and Two Curtains, 2018
Photographic drawing in colors printed on seven sheets of wove paper mounted to Dibond
Overall: 32 3/4 x 89 3/4 inches (83.2 x 228 cm)
Edition: 25

Picture at an Exhibition, 2018

DAVID HOCKNEY
Picture at an Exhibition, 2018
Photographic drawing print
Sheet: 23 5/8 x 76 3/8 inches (60×194 cm)
Edition: 25

Pictured Gathering with Mirror, 2018

DAVID HOCKNEY
Pictured Gathering with Mirror, 2018
Photographic drawing in colors printed on paper mounted on Dibond
Sheet: 23 1/4 x 63 3/8 inches (59×161 cm)
Edition: 25

Viewers Looking at a Ready-made with Skull and Mirrors, 2018

DAVID HOCKNEY
Viewers Looking at a Ready-made with Skull and Mirrors, 2018
Monumental photographic drawing in colors on four sheets of wove paper mounted on Dibond
Sheet: 71 1/2 x 42 1/2 inches (181.6 x 108 cm)
Edition: 25

Inside it Opens Up as Well, 2018

DAVID HOCKNEY
Inside it Opens Up as Well, 2018
Photographic drawing printed on paper mounted on Dibond
Sheet: 23 x 65 3/4 inches (58.4 x 165.1 cm)
Edition: 25

Focus Moving, 2018

DAVID HOCKNEY
Focus Moving, 2018
Photographic drawing printed on paper mounted on Dibond
Sheet: 35 1/8 x 45 1/2 inches (89.5 x 115.5 cm)
Edition: 25

Reading in the Studio, 2015

DAVID HOCKNEY
Reading in the Studio, 2015
Photographic drawing in colors on wove paper mounted on Dibond
Sheet: 42 1/4 x 59 1/4 inches (108 x 151.1 cm)
Edition: 25

The Studio Meeting, 2015

DAVID HOCKNEY
The Studio Meeting, 2015
Photographic drawing printed on paper flush-mounted on Dibond
Sheet: 33 1/8 x 45 3/4 inches (84.1 x 116.2 cm)
Edition: 25

The Scrabble Players, 2015

DAVID HOCKNEY
The Scrabble Players, 2015
Photographic drawing printed on paper and mounted on Dibond
Sheet: 42 1/4 x 42 1/4 inches (107×107 cm)
Edition: 25

 

 

 

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Photographic Collages (1982-1984)

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Attributed to his aversion of wide lens photography due to its distortive effect, David Hockney’s experiments from the 1980’s derive from his attempt to conjure more comprehensive renderings of scenes, portraits and landscapes. His first foray into “photographic manipulation” manifested in what he termed “joiners”: collages comprising multiple images depicting the same subject matter, meticulously arranged to dictate narrative beyond the confines of a single frame.

Sun on the Pool, Los Angeles, April 13th, 1982

Beginning rather simply, Hockney positioned his Polaroids in regimented grid-like structures to render scenes. He used this to map compositions for paintings, initially for landscapes that extended beyond the frame of a typical one-point focus. The success of those works let to further experiments with more complex manipulations of perspective.

Still Life Blue Guitar, 4th April 1982, 1982

 

“The main aspect was the lack of time in [traditional] photographs. I had become very, very aware of this ‘frozen’ moment that was very unreal to me. A photograph didn’t really have life in the way drawing or painting did. And I realized that it couldn’t, because of what it is.”

Eager to break the instantaneous restrictions of the medium, in 1980 Hockney began creating his joiners—collages comprised of multiple images, each taken from a different angle over an extended period of time. As such, a joiner presented a fluid, continuous narrative, gradually revealing Hockney’s movement around and within each scene.

The Desk, July 1st, 1984

DAVID HOCKNEY
The Desk, July 1st, 1984
Photocollage on board
Overall: 44 7/8 x 46 7/8 inches (114 x 119.1 cm)
Edition: 20

Tea Time, Los Angeles, April, 1983

DAVID HOCKNEY
Tea Time, Los Angeles, April, 1983
Photocollage on board
Sheet: 28 x 35 7/8 inches (71.1 x 91.1 cm)
Edition: 10

Gregory Watching the Snow Fall, Kyoto, Feb 21st, 1983

DAVID HOCKNEY
Gregory Watching the Snow Fall, Kyoto, Feb 21st, 1983
Photo collage on paper
Sheet: 46 5/8 x 43 5/8 inches (118.4 x 110.8 cm)
Edition: 20

Christopher Isherwood Talking to Bob Holman, 1983

DAVID HOCKNEY
Christopher Isherwood Talking to Bob Holman, 1983
Chromogenic print collage on paperboard
Sheet: 43 1/2 x 63 1/2 inches (110×162 cm)
Edition: 20

Ashtray, Sunday Morning, Tokyo, 1983

DAVID HOCKNEY
Ashtray, Sunday Morning, Tokyo, 1983
Photograph collage on paperboard laid on panel
Sheet: 55 7/8 x 53 1/8 inches (142×135 cm)
Edition: 15

Luncheon at the British Embassy, Tokyo Feb 16th, 1983

DAVID HOCKNEY
Luncheon at the British Embassy, Tokyo Feb 16th, 1983
Photo collage on paper
Sheet: 45 5/8 x 82 1/2 inches (116 x 209.5 cm)
Edition: 20

Canal and Road, Kyoto, 1983

DAVID HOCKNEY
Canal and Road, Kyoto, 1983
Photographic collage on card
Sheet: 58 x 74 1/2 inches (147.3 x 189.2 cm)
Edition: 10

Sitting in the Zen Garden at the Ryoanji Temple Kyoto, 1983

DAVID HOCKNEY
Sitting in the Zen Garden at the Ryoanji Temple Kyoto, 1983
Collage of chromogenic prints, mounted to grey board
Edition: 20