colour lithograph on two sheets of HMP handmade paper

Artwork date: 1985
Signature details: signed, dated and numbered 1/98 in pencil in the margin
Exhibited: Examples from the edition were exhibited:
Muse´e Granet, Aix-en-Provence, David Hockney. Works from the Tate Collection, 28 January to 28 May 2023.
Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, David Hockney: Moving Focus, 9 July to 30 October 2022.
STPI Gallery, Singapore, ‘David Hockney: A Matter of Perspective’, 1 July to 9 September 2017.
Cristea Roberts Gallery, London, David Hockney: Moving Focus, 19 January to 18 February 2012.
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, The Big Americans: Albers, Frankenthaler, Hockney, Johns, Lichtenstein, Motherwell, Rauschenberg and Stella, 4 Oct 2002 to 27 Jan 2003.
Literature: TATE Gallery, 2021. David Hockney: Moving Focus, TATE Publishing: London, illustrated in colour on p.p 148-149.

(1)

sheet size: 73.5 x 187 cm; framed size: 104.5 x 219 x 4 cm

Provenance:

Private collection, Johannesburg.

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

This multi-colour lithograph is one of two large prints David Hockney created on the theme of the Hotel Romano Angeles’ courtyard in Mexico. Both visually intricate and technically complex, these works are seminal pieces in Hockney’s acclaimed Moving Focus series, produced in collaboration with master printer Kenneth Tyler between 1984 and 1987.

Throughout his career, Hockney has been a prolific printmaker, realising some of his most iconic images in various print media. Considered his largest and most ambitious body of colour lithographs, the Moving Focus series not only sees Hockney boldly utilising lithography as a drawing medium – an extension of his crayon, charcoal, and brush drawings – but also stands as an important artistic investigation into representing space and time. Here, we see the artist combining the Renaissance tradition of fixed-viewpoint painting with the Eastern aesthetic of multiple, narrative viewpoints within the same picture. Hockney explained: “In these prints, there is no way to see what is depicted all at once. Your eyes have to move over the surface of the paper. In doing that, you're very aware that you keep moving from one thing to another and in your mind, you convert that time to space… Space can be made into time.”[1]

Hockney discovered the Hotel Romano Angeles in 1984 while en route from Mexico City to Oaxaca for the opening of his exhibition Hockney Paints the Stage at the Museo Rufino Tamayo. Car trouble delayed his travel plans, and he had to stay at the Hotel Romano Angeles in the small town of Acatlán. The hotel was built around a beautiful, sun-drenched central courtyard, full of tropical greenery with a water well as the focal point. The building’s rustic charm and the vibrant colours of the surroundings immediately inspired and captivated the artist. Reminding him of a stage set, the scene allowed Hockney to experiment with multi-point and reverse perspectives, giving the impression that one is travelling through and around the depicted rendering, mimicking in two dimensions the experience of seeing a three-dimensional environment more authentically than the single-point perspective of a conventional drawing or a camera lens.

"It has so many different perspectives that you are forced to move your eye constantly… It is a totally impossible view from one point, yet there is clarity and order in the picture. The effect of the space is extremely strong, yet it is not an illusion you want to walk into, because you are already in the picture and walking around," wrote Hockney in a letter to his friend R.B. Kitaj.[2]

The first print, Hotel Acatlán: Second Day, is based on drawings made of the hotel courtyard shortly after Hockney’s arrival. Further sketches made when he revisited the hotel on his return journey resulted in the current Hotel Acatlán: Two Weeks Later.

For these sketches, Hockney moved around the inner courtyard, sometimes sitting in the arcade and at other times next to the well, then condensed the different viewpoints into a single image. In addition to the spatial shift, there is also a temporal one, as Hockney depicts the hotel on the second day after his arrival, as well as two weeks later – revealing the passage of time.

Interestingly, in the captivating image of Hotel Acatlán: Two Weeks Later, the figure in the lower right corner of the composition refers to his 1954 portrait of his mother, Woman with a Sewing Machine.

For the final creation of these prints, rather than working in a printing studio, Tyler developed a new printing method that allowed Hockney to draw on-site, in plein air, onto portable Mylar sheets from which the image could then be directly transferred to aluminium photosensitive lithographic plates for printing. A consummate colourist, Hockney enthusiastically embraced this new technique. Using one sheet per colour, the transparent sheets allowed him to visualise the combined vibrant layers of his final composition at a single glance.

This innovation set a record for the number of printing elements used in this print series (a total of 577) with over 500 colours printed.

Marelize van Zyl

^{[1] Interview with Pat Gilmour at Tyler Graphics Ltd, Bedford, New York, 22 June 1985, quoted in Tyler, K. 1995. 'Layers of Space and Time: David Hockney's Moving Focus', in Contemporary Master Prints from the Lilja Collection, Lilja Art Fund Foundation in association with Azimuth Editions Limited: Liechtenstein and London, p. 124.}

^{[2] Syke, C.S. 2011. ‘A Walk Around the Hotel Courtyard, Acatlán’ in Hockney. The Authorised Biography, Century: New York, p.209}

COLLECTOR'S NOTE

• Significantly, this print is numbered 1 of 98 editions, originally printed and published by Tyler Graphics, Ltd., Bedford, New York.
• Other editions of this print are in the permanent collections of the Tate, London and Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis. Other prints from Moving Focus are in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC amongst others.
• Shortly after creating the Moving Focus series, the major showcase David Hockney: A Retrospective Exhibition opened at the County Museum of Art in Los Angeles in 1988, which later travelled to the MET in New York and the TATE in London.
• David Hockney is one of the most celebrated and prolific artists of this century. Endlessly versatile, the artist’s practice encompasses painting, printing, stage design, photography, and various digital media. His unmistakable style breaks boundaries both in the rules of art and across multiple artistic movements.
  In 2017, The Centre Pompidou, Paris, in collaboration with Tate Britain in London and the MET in New York dedicated the biggest-ever retrospective exhibition to him.
• In 2018, a new auction record for Hockney’s work was achieved at $ 90,312,500 for the sale of Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) in New York.

LEFT: David Hockney, Hotel Acatlán: Second Day (from Moving Focus), 1984-5.

RIGHT: Study charcoal drawing for Hotel Acatlán, Two Weeks Later, 1984

David Hockney at work in the courtyard of Hotel Acatlán. C. 1984. Photo Credit: Kunstmuseum Luzern.

COLLECTIONS:

The artist is represented in numerous local and international collections, notably, the Long Museum, Shanghai; Centre Pompidou, Paris; National Portrait Gallery, London; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Louisiana Museum of Art, Humlebaek; Royal Academy of Arts, London; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.