Sumo, 2016, David Hockney
50 x 70 cm (19.6 x 27.5 in.), 498 pages, 13 fold-outs with an adjustable bookstand designed by Marc Newson. Plus an illustrated 680-page chronology book.
Provenance: National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
David Hockney is one of the most acclaimed British artists of the 20th century. While best known for his collections of paintings of swimming pools, portraits and green landscapes, his prodigious output spans a range of ideas. Most often, he explores one motif in multiple pieces, painting it from a spectrum of viewpoints. “In art, new ways of seeing mean new ways of feeling; you can't divorce the two, as, we are now aware, you cannot have time without space and space without time,” he has explained. Since his first journey to California in the 1960s, he has split his time between the two divergent landscapes of Yorkshire and Los Angeles. n November 2018, his 1972 painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures) sold for a record-breaking $90.3 billion at Christie's, making it the most expensive painting by a living artist (1).
David Hockney’s Sumo is a collection of more than 60 years of his work. It took more than a year for Hockney and his editor to select and sequence more than 450 works for display in a vibrant blaze of colour over 500 pages. Along with many of his major works, Hockney has published many of his drawings, photo-composites, multi-perspective collages, stage designs, multi-camera video works, and iPad drawings (2).