Emerging and Historic Prints to Buy This Week
Artsy Specialist
A Bigger Book, TASCHEN’s SUMO-sized David Hockney monograph, is as spectacular in format as it is in scope. In it, the artist takes stock of more than 60 years of work, from his teenage days at the Bradford School of Art, through his breakthrough in 1960s Swinging London, life by Los Angeles pools in the 1970s, up to his recent extensive series of portraits, iPad drawings, and Yorkshire landscapes.
Never before has Hockney’s oeuvre been published on such an astonishing and immersive scale. As each page unfurls in a blaze of blues, pinks, greens, and oranges, we are spellbound both by the artist’s vibrancy as a colorist and his extraordinary sense of the conditions of the world that surrounds us. Through Hockney’s restless interrogation of perception and representation, we witness the mellow sheen of light on a muddy Yorkshire puddle, the ochre enormities of A Bigger Grand Canyon, the rustic majesty of Bigger Trees near Warter, and, of course, A Bigger Splash, with the exquisite sparkle of a turquoise pool beneath an iridescent California sky. These major paintings are joined by the artist’s drawings, photo-composites, multi-perspective collages, stage designs, multi-camera video works, and iPad drawings, each a panoply of looking and showing in different styles and media.
Hockney himself is present in every aspect of the publication. He collaborated closely through all production stages and conceived of this book as a purely visual survey of more than 450 works prefaced by a handwritten programmatic statement. As an artist who rarely looks back, the vast volume is as much his own personal review as it is a definitive record for art lovers all over the world. “I don’t tend to live in the past,” he comments, “Working on this book, I see quite how much I have done.” To add to the sumptuous portfolio, the monograph also includes an illustrated chronology of 680 pages, contextualizing Hockney’s art with drawings, graphic work, portrait photos, and text based on the artist’s own writings as well as contemporary reviews.
This limited Art Edition of A Bigger Book offers the most lavish presentation of Hockney’s monograph, with an exclusive ink-jet print of one of Hockney’s famed iPad drawings, printed under the artist’s supervision in his Los Angeles studio. The vibrant work shows a bunch of pink tulips in a vase and forms part of Hockney’s celebrated flower series on iPad and iPhone, testimony to his ongoing experimentation with artistic tools. “There’s magic in an iPad,” the artist comments, “It’s the same magic that’s in a pencil or pen or brushes.”
Limited Art Edition of 250 signed copies; each with iPad drawing Untitled, 346, 2010, printed on archival paper, signed by the artist and numbered; and a Marc Newson bookstand
Signature: Print and book signed by David Hockney.
Publisher: TASCHEN
Printed and bound in Italy.
About David Hockney
A pioneer of the British Pop Art movement in the early 1960s alongside Richard Hamilton, David Hockney gained recognition for his semi-abstract paintings on the theme of homosexual love before it was decriminalized in England in 1967. In We Two Boys Clinging Together (1961), red-painted couples embrace one other while floating amidst fragments from a Walt Whitman poem. After moving to California at the end of 1963, Hockney began painting scenes of the sensual and uninhibited life of athletic young men, depicting swimming pools, palm trees, and perpetual sunshine. Experimenting with photography in the mid-1970s, Hockney went on to create his famous photocollages with Polaroids and snapshot prints arranged in a grid formation, pushing the two-dimensionality of photography to the limit, fragmenting the monocular vision of the camera and activating the viewer in the process. A versatile artist, Hockney has produced work in almost every medium—including full-scale opera set designs, prints, and drawings using cutting-edge technology such as fax machines, laser photocopiers, computers, and even iPhones and iPads.
British, b. 1937, Bradford, United Kingdom, based in Yorkshire, United Kingdom
