Executed in 1984, Conversation in the Studio, from the Moving Focus series, depicts the artist’s studio in vivid, primary colours decorated with distinctive armchairs, slanting yellow floorboards and pots of paintbrushes. Rendered in bold crayon-like lines, the studio space is constructed using multiple viewpoints, allowing the viewer to experience the space in its fullness. By adopting reverse perspective, Hockney achieves a dynamic representation of space on a two-dimensional surface, clearly inspired by Picasso’s study of perspective. Transcending the strictures of traditional single point perspective and challenging the conventional canons of composition, Conversation in the Studio is a remarkable example of Hockney’s revolutionary depiction of space and his fascination with colour and line.
“A view from sitting still, from a stationary point, is not the way you usually see landscape; you are always moving through it. If you put a vanishing point anywhere, it means you’ve stopped. In a way, you’re hardly there.”
— David Hockney
For Hockney, single-point perspective is a limited, constrictive way of communicating our experience of the world around us, which he likens to “looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed Cyclops – for a split second.” Drawing inspiration from the Cubism of Picasso’s 1980 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, for Moving Focus, Hockney embraced a pictorial structure that could accommodate multiple viewpoints and perspectives as well as time and movement. In the present lot, the single point perspective of the Renaissance tradition is turned on its head. Instead, the use of reverse perspective and multiple viewpoints create a dynamic and striking composition.
Shortly after moving to California, in the mid-1960s, David Hockney began his working relationship with master printer Kenneth Tyler. Working with Tyler in all four of his workshops, Hockney found a joyous freedom in the variety of mark-making he could develop and explore through lithography. It was with Tyler that Hockney embarked on his ambitious Moving Focus series, where he dove into his enduring concern with the construction of images, the complexities of space, and the assembly of multiple perspectives. The result was a body of work which remains his largest and most pioneering series of colour lithographs, comprising 29 prints of interior views and chairs, exterior views of a Mexican hotel, and portraits of some of his most well-known sitters including Celia Birtwell and Gregory Evans.
