Picture of a Still Life on a Table
David Hockney
One of the most important and prolific British artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, David Hockney is synonymous with
the flat planes and bright shades of his early paintings, which captured the sun-drenched idyll of 1960s California, epitomised by his Swimming Pool series (1963-67). Working in acrylic, these works emphasised the two-dimensional quality of the canvas, reminiscent of the glossy pages of a magazine.
In 1965, the year he painted Picture of a Still Life on a Table, David Hockney held his second solo exhibition at the Kasmin Gallery in London. His association with the gallery, which at the time also represented Kenneth Noland and Frank Stella, can be felt in this work.
Reflecting on their enduring influence Hockney explains, “The ‘artistic devices’ are images and elements of my own and other artists’ work and ideas of the time… All the paintings were, in a way, influenced by American abstractionists, particularly Kenneth Noland, whom I’d got to know through Kasmin who was showing him. I was trying to take note of these paintings… they’re all done the same way as Kenneth Noland’s, stained acrylic paint on raw cotton duck, and things like that.”