- CONDITION
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Signed, titled, dated and numbered on the bottom center.
There are staining throughout the surface due to aging.
There are handling marks on the upper left corner edge, lower left corner edge, lower center edge, and left center edge.
There is some discoloration on the left edge.
There are brown dots on the lower left in places.
- DESCRIPTION
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Born in the city of Bradford in the North of England, David Hockney (1937-) has been one of the leading artists of the British Pop Art movement since the 1960s. After moving to the West Coast of the United States in 1964, Hockney produced many iconic works, including the “Water” series and The Splash (1966), which are reminiscent of Los Angeles.
Throughout his career, Hockney has consistently employed various mediums in the image-making process. Yet amongst them, printmaking stands out as one of Hockney’s most fundamental and signature mediums. Hockney made prints independently as an art student, but around the 1970s began presenting prints produced in collaboration with various printing studios.
The body of work, titled Lithographic Water Made of Lines, is a series of lithographs produced by the printmaking studio Tyler Graphics between 1978 and 1980. The simple lines and dot mark-making in Lithographic Water Made of Lines captures characteristic visual elements of the everyday, this is in contrast with Lithographic Water Made of Lines and Crayon, which faithfully reproduces the textures of crayon. This unique lithographic technique conveys the brilliance of the sun’s rays cascading down on the surface of the water whilst adding a new layer of texture. This process expresses the essence of Hockney’s life work: to capture the visual contrast of the landscape through inventive acts of “Mark-making”.
My Pool and Terrace, with its striking three-color line drawing in vibrant hues of red, blue, and green, is a lithograph work released by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 1983. This work was part of an album titled Eight by Eight to Celebrate the Temporary Contemporary, which featured works by eight artists. The album was produced by the museum, which had just opened in 1979, to raise funds.
In 1986, Hockney presented Living Room and Terrace as part of the Home-Made Prints series at the André Emmerich Gallery. One of the major differences between this work and the previously described prints is that, as the name of the series suggests, it is a handmade print work using an office color copy machine. This print differed from Hockney’s prints, which up until now had been created carefully and produced by conventional printmakers in workshops. Hockney took advantage of the ease of reproduction brought about by the spread of copy machines and began to explore the printing process independently. Yet Hockney still applied a printing process similar to lithographs, contrary to the conventional use of copy printers. By printing each color layer by layer, Hockney adds a thickness to the seemingly flat living room and terrace, capturing the exquisite contrasts between inside and outside.
- PROVENANCE
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Kohji Ogura Gallery, Nagoya
- LITERATURE
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"David Hockney, Cameraworks", Kindler Verlag, 1984, p.97
"David Hockney", Prestel, 1995, p.14
"David Hockney: Portraits", National Portrait Gallery, 2006, p.58