Modern & Contemporary Art 
22 February 2023
Modern & Contemporary Art 
117

David Hockney b.1937

Untitled (Still Life with Chair)

1989
xerox copy of facsimile drawing in 16 parts each: 8½ h × 14 w in (22 × 36 cm) overall: 34½ h × 56¼ w in (88 × 143 cm)
estimate: $15,000–20,000
result: $15,120
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The artist faxed an unknown number of copies of this original work to his friends and associates. The original artwork is held by the David Hockney Foundation and these works are recognized as a xeroxed copy of an original by the artist.
provenance: Acquired directly from the artist by Stanley Donen | Acquired from the previous by the present owner
literature: David Hockney: FAX Dibujos/FAX Cuadros, Centro Cultural Arte Contemporaneo, A.C. exhibition catalog, unpaginated illustrates key

This work will ship from LAMA in Los Angeles, California.

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Original Fax-similes

David Hockney's Fax Art

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, David Hockney took to creating “art faxes” with fax machines, a device he referred to as “the wonderful machine, the enemy of totalitarianism, the return of handwritten letters.” Known for embracing emergent technologies in his process, Hockney was clearly delighted by novelty and dissemination possibilities that faxing offered – and he had no intention of the works maintaining much, if any, value. In 1989, he participated in the São Paolo Biennial “via fax,” according to the David Hockney Foundation. When the Brazilian telephone network was unable to receive the faxes, Hockney sent the faxes from room to room in a Los Angeles hotel, which were then packed in a suitcase to be taken to Brazil.

This particular work was faxed to famed film director Stanley Donen, perhaps best known for Singin’ In the Rain (1952), who was a friend to Hockney. Over time, Hockney would learn how to adapt his drawings to accommodate the fax machine, using an opaque grey in order for halftones to be apparent in the final work.

The fax show in Brazil caused quite a stir. But many people saw the philosophical side, the interesting side, the use of printing to make original artworks. I assume that even though people think my work is very popular, it often takes them time to see what I am really doing, to see what it is that I am exploring, that it is not just a wild thing, but something that grows out of something else, and will grow into something else again.

David Hockney

David Hockney b. 1937

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David Hockney is considered one of the most influential artists of the 20th century and of the British pop art movement. A painter, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer, his unmistakable style breaks boundaries both in the rules of art and across multiple artistic movements. Born in 1937 in Bradford, England he studied at the Royal College of Art, but did not graduate on account of declining to submit an essay along with his final work. In the 1960s, his bright, figurative paintings of Los Angeles swimming pools accompanied by Californian landscapes as wells as personal subject matter including portraits of friends ignited his career. In 1963, at the age of 26, he had his first one-man show and in 1970 the White Chapel Gallery exhibited his first retrospective.

In the early 1980s, he began working in photocollage, or “joiners” as he called them, exploring movement and photography. In a recent 2016 exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, Hockney debuted a series of works created on the iPhone and iPad exhibiting his love for technology.

Hockney is a highly celebrated artist receiving the First Annual Award of Achievement from the Archives of American Art, Los Angeles in 1993, the Lorenzo de’ Medici Lifetime Career Award of the Florence Biennale, Italy in 2003, and appointment to the Order of Merit by Queen Elizabeth II in 2012 among many others. His work is also held amongst some of the most distinguished collections around the world including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Art Institute of Chicago, Tate Gallery London, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C., Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. David Hockney lives and works in the Hollywood Hills, California.

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