David Hockney – Slow Rise

Description

David Hockney, Slow Rise is from his series entitled Some More New Prints. This print is an original screenprint and lithograph in colors on Wove paper. Signed and dated in the lower right, numbered in the lower left from the edition of 68. Published by Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles, with their blindstamp.

The painter, printmaker, photographer and stage designer David Hockney is one of the most successful and influential of all living English artists. Based in America for much of his adult creative life, his reputation rests on his fine drawing skills, as well as his innovative work in the field of printmaking and photocollage. Seen as a founding member of the British Pop Art movement in the 1960s, he has been the subject of countless solo exhibitions worldwide including a major touring retrospectives staged at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Tate Gallery, London in 1988, and the Royal Academy of Arts in London (1995-6).

In 1959 David Hockney went to the Royal College of Art in London to continue his art studies: “Immediately after I started at the Royal College I realized that there were two groups of students there: a traditional group, who carried on as they had done in art school, doing still life, life painting and figure compositions; and then what I thought of as the more adventurous, lively students, the brightest ones, who were involved in the art of their time. They were doing big Abstract Expressionist paintings on hardboard.”

David Hockney duly tried abstraction, but found it too sterile. During this time Hockney was in a phase of rapid self-discovery on both artistic and personal levels. David Hockney was coming to terms with his own sexuality while at the same time searching for an artistic style. Since figure-painting seemed ‘anti-modern’ David Hockney began by including words in his art as a way of humanizing them, but these were soon joined by figures painted in a deliberately rough and rudimentary style which owed a great deal to artist Jean Dubuffet. In 1961, while still a student at the Royal College of Art, David Hockney was featured in the exhibition Young Contemporaries—alongside artist Peter Blake—that announced the arrival of British Pop Art. This show marked the public emergence of a new Pop movement in Britain, with Hockney considered one of its leaders.