Throughout his remarkable career, David Hockney has demonstrated both a profound passion for the great avant-garde traditions of the past and a voraciously creative vision for his own, category-defying artistic practice. Exemplifying this enigmatic balance in his oeuvre, Chair from 1985 powerfully fuses an eloquent tribute to past masters Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Pablo Picassowith the striking subversion of traditional perspective that defines many of Hockney’s masterworks. It is a truly exceptional example of the rich color palette, compositional structure, and intimately significant subject matter that characterises the very best of his output. Widely renowned as Britain’s greatest living painter, Hockney’s remarkable output is predicated upon a unique ability to absorb, execute, and contribute to the greatest avant-garde movements of Twentieth Century while simultaneously defying strict categorisation. In its seamless fusion of art historical homage and highly particularised artistic sent.mes nt, Chair encapsulates the indisputable vitality, innovation, and enchanting charm of Hockney’s inimitable painterly oeuvre.

Hockney’s enthusiasm and appreciation for artists such as Vincent van Gogh, so profoundly imbued in the luminescent canvas of Chair, significantly predates the creation of the present work. Describings his engagement with the Post-Impressionist master, Hockney remarked, “I’ve always had quite a passion for Van Gogh, but certainly from the early seventies it grew a lot, and it’s still growing. I became aware of how wonderful [his paintings] really were. Somehow they became more real to me…it is only recently they’ve really lived for me” (David Hockney cited in: Marco Livingstone, David Hockney, New York, 1997, p. 149). In his 1972 painting Chair and Shirt, Hockney offers an early indication of Van Gogh’s influence upon his practice; in that fiercely poignant painting, which shows the discarded shirt of Hockney’s ex-lover, Peter Schlesinger, draped over a solitary, empty chair, Hockney emphatically demonstrates the evocation of human presence which distinguishes both his and Van Gogh’s paintings. Several years later, Hockney declared his allegiance to Van Gogh outright, among three other painterly masters, in his celebrated painting Looking at Pictures on a Screen, one of the last two canvases the artist painted in London before leaving for New York in the summer of 1977. In that work, now on permanent loan to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Hockney depicts his close friend, the art historian and critic Henry Geldzahler, as he considers four paintings by the artists Vermeer, Piero della Francesca, Van Gogh, and Degas. Prominently displayed in pride of place, directly to the figure’s right, hangs a talismanic reproduction of Van Gogh’s riotously glorious Sunflowers, the vibrant yellow petals echoed in the muted pastel hues of Geldzahler’s suit. The following summer, Hockney would dedicate himself to producing his own series of Sunflowers, rendered in the richly tactile medium of pressed colour paper pulp. Indeed, in its vibrant homage to Van Gogh’s iconic canvas, Chair is itself a poignant counterpart to the artist’s earlier rendering of Van Gogh’s Chair, which the artist was invited to create in celebration of the centenary of Van Gogh’s arrival in Arles.

Hockney infuses the present work with his own characteristic playfulness and highly personalised aesthetic, effortlessly straddling the parallel modes of art historical precedent and a pioneering contemporary practice. Breaking with the original composition, he radically collapses traditional single-point perspective to depict each side of the chair, not as it would be seen through a window or doorframe, but as if the viewer were within the plane of the picture, consciously and simultaneously connecting multiple vantage points. In a manner reminiscent of Paul Cézanne or Pablo Picasso, Hockney’s flattened space allows discrete moments to not only coincide, but to miraculously coexist upon the canvas in a truest expression of reality. This warping of traditional perspectival space, which characterises Hockney’s output of the late 1980s, stems from the artist’s desire to paint in a manner that “comes closer to how we actually see – which is to say, not all at once, but in discrete, separate glimpses which we then build into our continuous experience of the world” (David Hockney cited in: Lawrence Weschler, “True to Life,” The New Yorker, July 9, 1984, p. 62). Hockney infuses Chair with the warm, ever-present sunshine of Los Angeles, filling the painting with the dazzling, liberating zest which characterises his painterly oeuvre. A remarkably intimate engagement with his art historical predecessors, Chair emphatically demonstrates Hockney’s ability to merge the painterly techniques of the past with his own distinctive, inventive, and remarkably intimate experience of reality.