David Hockney Moving Focus Series For Sale

David Hockney’s Moving Focus series, spanning 1984-86, is his largest series of works comprising 26 lithographs, in which he worked for the first time with California based master printer, Kenneth Tyler, to boldly evolve his own artistic language.

The eponymous Moving Focus series of prints emerged from Hockney’s relocation to the sunny climes of California and impressed by the vibrant landscapes, he adopted new colours and form in the series. In California, he met Kenneth Tyler, who had previously collaborated with other pop art luminaries, such as Roy Lichtenstein, who gave new printing innovation and technical refinement to Hockney’s colourist vision which also is infused with the spirit of the Yorkshire countryside he grew up in.

Kenneth Tyler commented: ‘This collaboration set a record for the number of printing elements made (a total of 577) with some 500 colours printed on twenty-eight editions and one four-panel screen. The traditional forms of creating colour lithography would have taken nearly three times as long to make and would not have been portable. The combined skills of sixteen workshop collaborators (myself included) at Tyler Graphics Ltd. made this work possible, along with David’s specially designed frames (fabricated by Jerry Solomon Enterprises in L.A.). Given all the innovations and the complexity of the works (both visual and technically), I think of this as one of the seminal print projects of my career and certainly one of the most exciting.’

The Moving Focus series is as broad in its subject matter and themes as it is in its style and composition. Hockney transcends categorisation: he segues between multiple art forms in his oeuvre – etching, screen printing, photographic collage, pencil drawing – and in this series he combines many different methods into the prints that span portraiture, still life, and interior scenes.

In Moving Focus, Hockney also plays with artistic traditions and viewpoints, combining the precise depictions of Renaissance portraits and the Eastern style which combined multiple aesthetics and narratives within the same picture. Indeed, it was Hockney’s love of the horizontal style storytelling of traditional Chinese scrolls, which led him to the ‘…Chinese principle of moving focus…and you can convert time to space.’

For the first time, in the Moving Focus series, the artist explores perspective, light and space evoking a sense of motion and movement into his prints – see Conversation in the Studio, Pembroke Studio with Blue Chairs and Lamp – in particular examining how perspective has been manipulated across art movements from Renaissance to Cubism.

Moving Focus is also concerned with ideas of place: the lithographs Hotel Acatlan, Hotel Acatlan: Second Day are inspired by a trip Hockney went on to Mexico City where his car broke down at the then unknown hotel. The lush, vibrant colour palette of bold yellows, leaf greens, blood red and bright blue actively resemble the Mexico landscape. Hockney later revisited the hotel on his way back, Hotel Acatlan: Two Weeks Later, portraying the location through landscape, panoramic and a new distorted interior birds-eye perspective, enhanced by the skewed hand painted frames the artist designed.

Other prints that evoke Hockney’s passion for memories, surroundings and emotional resonance include the portraits he does of close family and friends, including Portrait of a Mother I, where the artist invites the viewer intimately into a celebration of this central female influence in his life. Also in Red Celia, a striking red pencil sketching of his close friend, the famed British fashion designer, Celia Birtwell, he elevates the print with vivid references to Cubism and Picasso’s portraiture techniques: he abstracts the figure through bold colouring, fragmented patterns, and shading.

Hockney pays homage to other great art canonical figures, such as Matisse and Van Gogh, with the still life prints – Amaryllis In Vase, White Porcelain – which make up the rest of the seminal Moving Focus series. In this explorative Moving Focus series, Hockney breaks new ground in artistic form and language, simultaneously exploring the fragility of life and beauty, and the power of memory. He is ultimately an artist, who is able to be in dialogue with his own work, who can keep ‘moving focus.’