David Hockney
Covered by droit de suite
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'Joe MacDonald in His Apartment, New York, Dec 1982'
Signed David Hockney and numbered #13 on the mount. A total edition of 20. Photographic collage 100.5 x 137.5 cm including frame.
Provenance
Acquired directly from the artist in New York via Swedish gallerist Björn Bengtsson, 1984.
Literature
David Hockney and Lawrence Weschler, "Cameraworks", 1984, illustrated on pl. 83.
More information
David Hockney's good friend Joe MacDonald is pictured as a lithograph in Hockney's graphic series "Friends", made in 1976, and in the auction's photo collage from 1982. Joe MacDonald (1945-1983) and Hockney met in New York where MacDonald was working as a model. He became one of Hockney's favourite models and personal friend until he became the first person in Hockney's circle of friends to be diagnosed with AIDS, dying at the age of 32.
In 1982, Hockney discovered the photographic technique. In the first half of the year he created as many as 150 photo collages from Polaroids. In June he held his first exhibition of photographs alone, 'Drawing with a Camera', at the André Emmerich Gallery in New York.
With his collages, David Hockney wants to explore the truthfulness of photography: can a photograph really reflect the true image of a person? Nowadays, most people would answer no to that question, but what if you instead take lots of pictures at the same time and of the same subject. Wouldn't the true image appear?
This is how Hockney himself describes his photo collages and the feeling of discovering a completely new technique:
Så här beskriver Hockney själv sina fotokollage och känslan av att upptäcka en helt ny teknik:
“The main point was that you read it differently. It wasn’t just a photograph. It was abstracted, stylized: the ideas were based on Cubism in the way that it filters things down to an essence… It worked so well that I couldn’t believe what was happening when I looked at it. I saw all these different spaces, and I thought: ‘My God! I’ve never seen anything like this in photography.’ Then I was at the camera night and day. I bought a thousand dollars of Polaroid film straight away! Within a week I’d done very complex things. I quickly discovered that I didn’t have to match things up at all. In fact, I couldn’t possibly match them, and it wasn’t necessary. The joiners were much closer to the way we actually look at things, closer to the truth of the experience.”
quote from: www.thedavidhockneyfoundation.org