Phillips Celebrates David Hockney by Establishing an Annual Auction Dedicated to the Artist’s Work
Phillips is pleased to announce an expanded sale calendar for Editions auctions in London, following a record-breaking year in 2022. Having established market leadership in London and following their successful White Glove David Hockney auction in 2022, Phillips’ London Editions Department have added a dedicated David Hockney auction to the annual schedule. This standalone Hockney auction will become a regular fixture in Phillips’ London sale calendar and will feature a diverse selection of rare to market works, of all mediums and at a variety of price points. To celebrate one of the most influential contemporary artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, the David Hockney auction this year will be held in London on 20 September with an exhibition open to the public from 14 to 20 September at 30 Berkeley Square.
Phillips’ upcoming David Hockney auction will feature a broad selection of works which span the entirety of the artist’s career, including two of Hockney’s earliest and most rare lithographs: Woman With A Sewing Machine and Fish and Chip Shop. Both produced in 1954 while the teenaged Hockney was a student at Bradford School of Art, these images provide tender and highly personal insights into the artist’s formative years. Fish and Chip Shop includes an early self-portrait of the artist leaning on the counter of his local takeaway – The Sea Catch in Bradford – while the figure seated in Woman With A Sewing Machine is modelled on Hockney’s mother. Recalling the interior scenes of French masters such as Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, these two works also foreground Hockney’s comprehensive understanding of art history and the numerous references at play throughout his oeuvre.
Following these early forays into printmaking, Hockney has continued to create seminal artworks in a variety of media over the past six decades. Also included in Phillips’ dedicated-artist auction are iconic swimming pool compositions such as Lithographic Water Made of Lines, Crayon, and Two Blue Washes, as well as Pembroke Studio Interior fromHockney’s pioneering Moving Focus series. Showcasing how the artist has continually sought to push the boundaries of traditional printmaking, examples of Hockney’s recent iPad drawings accompany Self-Portrait, July 1986 – a superb example of the experimental ‘Home-Made Prints’ that Hockney developed in the 1980s using an office photocopier.
Now aged 85, David Hockney continues to combine technical innovation with an endless fascination for exploring how we see and make art, qualities which are hugely appealing to art enthusiasts. As the artist’s work develops so does our interest in it and we are only seeing growth in collectors looking to acquire Hockney’s work. Art collectors of all genres and generations have demonstrated a desire to engage with the artist’s ever-evolving concepts. This accrescent fascination with Hockney’s work is made evident through activations taking place worldwide to celebrate the artist, such as the recent show at Pace Gallery in New York and Palm Beach, the new immersive exhibition open at Lightroom in London, the upcoming large scale solo show in the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo from 15 July to 5 November, and a retrospective focused on the artist’s portraiture at London’s National Portrait Gallery, which is scheduled to open in November 2023.
Auction viewing: 14 – 20 September 2023
Location: 30 Berkeley Square, London
Click here for more information: https://www.phillips.com/auctions/auction/UK030423