Ink In The Room
Signed Print

A strange dreamlike interior, made up of lurid yellow walls, green tiles and a watery blue floor is populated by two standing stones or figures that cast long shadows. The scene is wreathed in serpent like dripping vines and planes of pattern and colour. Entitled Ink In The Room the work is related to the series of paintings Hockney was commissioned to make for the set of a production of Richard Strauss’s opera, Die Frau Ohne Schatten, or the woman without a shadow, in 1992. With this as his starting point Hockney went on to make a series called Some New Paintings and the year after a series of lithographs, to which this work belongs, entitled Some New Prints. Made in collaboration with the Gemini Print Workshop in LA whom Hockney had worked with before on portfolios such as Friends, the prints combine lithography and screen printing to create fantastical scenes of vibrant colour, their dynamic compositions acting as prompts for the viewer’s eye to ‘wander’ around the work as Hockney intended. The works also show Hockney’s ongoing fascination with Cubism – which allowed him to present multiple viewpoints at once, an idea he had already explored in his photographic collage series and the Moving Focus portfolio – as well as his continued desire to push the limits of printmaking.