Two Vases Of Cut Flowers And A Liriope Plant
Signed Print

Two Vases Of Cut Flowers And A Liriope Plant is a signed lithograph published in an edition of 78 as part of the 1979 Gemini portfolio, David Hockney’s second collaboration with the celebrated LA print workshop. While the rest of the series is concentrated on a handful of his friends, here Hockney chooses to depict a classic subject from the history of art, and his own oeuvre, the still life. Cut flowers feature heavily throughout his portraits as well as being sitters in their own right throughout much of his career and here we see his love for presenting plants and flowers in interiors or staged tableaux, as if to highlight or explore the contrast between the natural and the artificial it evokes. As well as the juxtaposition of inside and outside, there is further contrast between the flowers and the plant. While the tulips are neatly arranged in a tall vase the liriope plant spills over its basket, like a messy head of hair, as if to emphasise the human need to control nature. Here the plant refuses to be tamed or neatly enclosed, and becomes almost as unruly as a human subject, dominating the composition with its anthropomorphised personality.