Untitled For Joel Wachs
Signed Print

Produced for Joel Wachs, an American politician, member of the Los Angeles City Council and acting president of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Untitled For Joel Wachs is part of British artist David Hockney’s Abstractions collection of works. Like other works in the series, such as Twelve Fifteen, its subject matter is unclear. Rather than opting for any simple and representational approach to image-making, however, this piece actively engages with notions of compositeness, recalling Hockney’s Photo Collages. Like those works, here Hockney combines many individual views of a given subject into a singular image which breaches the definitional limits of likeness. In 1993, Hockney produced his Very New Paintings series. Much like those works, Untitled For Joel Wachs is very much a two-dimensional rendering of space in which the boundaries between representation and non-representation are crossed, mixed, and obfuscated. In 1995, Hockney went on to enlarge the representational potential of these abstract works, producing the Snails Space series. This series largely comprised depictions of smaller sections of an installation entitled Snails Space With Vari-Lites (1995-1996). The large-scale piece was exhibited at Washington D.C.’s Smithsonian Museum in the same year.