An Image Of Celia (State II)
An Image Of Celia (State II)
Signed Print
David Hockney
170 x 128cm, Edition of 10, Lithograph, 1986
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Meaning & Analysis
An Image Of Celia, State II (1986) is David Hockney’s largest colour print composed of 288 separate copier prints. The work presents Celia Birtwell who became the icon of Hockney’s portraits in the 1980s and features in over thirty of his prints.
As part of the printmaking process, the artist cut up his previous work, An Image Of Celia, State I, and mixed its fragments to compose a shaped collage. After the lithographed sheets and fragments of black and white paper had been combined, Hockney added the screenprinting and a frame adjusted to the irregular outlines of the playful, cut-and-pasted composition. Considering that Hockney rarely mixed mediums, An Image Of Celia, State II can be seen as one of his most sophisticated prints.
Working with the materials of An Image Of Celia, State I, Hockney placed the Vogue head over the one he had first drawn and added new layers of drawing around it. While the first state consisted of sixteen plates, the new version incorporates thirty-three.
The Cubist imagery, recognizable in how Hockney depicted the female face, is accompanied here by a vibrant colour palette. The print juxtaposes elements of blue, green, and orange, a bold combination evocative of the artist’s most famous works, such as Pool And Pink Pole (1984) or Montcalm Interior With 2 Dogs (1988).
