View of Hotel Well I

Description

About the ‘Moving Focus Series’
In 1984 whilst traveling through Mexico, David Hockney and his fellow travelers Gregory Evans & David Graves took lodging at a beautiful hotel in the city of Acatlan after experiencing car troubles. The group was on their way to the opening of the theatre design retrospective at the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City. The hotel in which they stayed was uniquely inspiring to Hockney, and he produced a number of important artworks as a result of the trip.
Specifically the hotel’s courtyard inspired a set of drawings, paintings, and later a series of three lithographs (Hotel Well I-III) known as the ‘Moving Focus Series’ or also commonly known as the ‘Hotel Well Series’. In these works, at first the perspective is conventional, and concentrates on the central well, observing multiple points of view from walking the courtyard. The three lithographs have a progressive aesthetic build. “Hotel Well I” is a rough sketch of the courtyard, while “Hotel Well II” builds in color and movement, and finally the perspective is fully realized in “Hotel Well III”.
The pieces are included in the original Hockney designed and hand-painted frames. The frames themselves are a magnificent extension of the play on perspective highlighted in the lithographs. The series is one of the most iconic and sought after for David Hockney as a result of their luscious color, unique perspectives, as well as relevance to David Hockney’s oeuvre.