After a spectacular year at the London Editions auctions in 2022, Phillips is happy to announce an expanded sale calendar. Phillips’ London Editions Department has added a particular David Hockney auction to the annual programme after establishing market leadership in London and holding a successful White Glove David Hockney auction in 2022. This Hockney-only sale at Phillips London will become a yearly tradition, and it will offer a wide range of works from the artist across all mediums and price categories. From September 14-20, the public is invited to 30 Berkeley Square for a David Hockney exhibition honouring one of the most significant British artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, with the sale taking place on September 20.
Robert Kennan, Head of Editions, Europe, said, “This regular David Hockney sale in the auction calendar looks to celebrate the achievements of the artist, from his early Bradford School of Art lithographs to his latest iPad publications and an exciting variety of works in between. The demand for the artist’s work was made evident to us in the extraordinary response we received to our standalone Hockney auction in September 2022. There is a huge demand for the expansive spectrum of work Hockney has produced in a variety of mediums throughout his lifetime. This fixed auction is an opportunity to acquire Hockney’s work at all price points; from entry-level works priced at £1,000 to higher value pieces at £250,000 and above, there is something for every collector. Contemporary edition collecting is something we feel incredibly passionate about and reinventing the auction calendar by creating curated sales such as David Hockney allows us to respond to our community and better engage with global collectors, whilst reflecting our innovative approach to meeting current collecting demands.”
Woman With A Sewing Machine and Fish and Chip Shop, two of Hockney’s earliest and rarest lithographs, will be part of Phillips’ upcoming David Hockney auction, which will offer a wide variety of works spanning the length of the artist’s career. Both were created in 1954, when Hockney was a student at Bradford School of Art and still a teenager, and they are intimate, deeply personal looks at that time in the artist’s life. Hockney’s mother was the inspiration for the sitting figure in Woman With A Sewing Machine, and an early self-portrait of the artist leaning on the counter of his local takeaway, The Sea Catch in Bradford, appears in Fish and Chip Shop. These two paintings highlight Hockney’s extensive knowledge of art history and the myriad references at play across his output while also calling to mind the interior settings of French artists such as Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard.
Since those early excursions into printmaking, Hockney has spent the past sixty years producing groundbreaking works in a wide range of media. The groundbreaking Pembroke Studio Interior from Hockney’s Moving Focus series is being auctioned off alongside such poolside classics as Lithographic Water Made of Lines, Crayon, and Two Blue Washes. Examples of Hockney’s recent iPad drawings show how the artist has sought to push the boundaries of traditional printmaking alongside Self-Portrait, July 1986, a superb example of the experimental ‘Home-Made Prints’ that Hockney developed in the 1980s using an office photocopier.
David Hockney, who is now 85 years old, has always been very popular among art aficionados thanks to his ability to combine technical innovation with an everlasting curiosity for studying how humans view and make art. Collector interest in Hockney’s work continues to rise alongside the artist’s reputation and the quality of his oeuvre. Art enthusiasts of various eras and backgrounds have shown an interest in discussing the artist’s constantly developing ideas. Recent exhibitions at Pace Gallery in New York and Palm Beach, the new immersive exhibition at Lightroom in London, and the upcoming retrospective focused on the artist’s portraiture at London’s National Portrait Gallery, set to open in November 2023, are all examples of the growing interest in Hockney’s work around the world.
image courtesy: Phillips
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