Diptychon
Diptychon
Signed Print
David Hockney
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Medium: Screenprint
Edition size: 50
Year: 1989
Size: H 43cm x W 55cm
Signed: Yes
Format: Signed Print
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Meaning & Analysis
Emphasising colour and contrast, David Hockney’s screenprint Diptychon (1989) exhibits striking lines, clean forms, and vivid juxtapositions. As part of the printmaking process, the artist cut paper sheets into forms of varying shapes and sizes and arranged them into playful structures. Throughout his career, Hockney has favoured etchings over other printmaking media. Following Cleanliness Is Next To Godliness (1964), Hockney’s famous print of a naked man standing behind a shower curtain, Diptychon is a rare instance of the artist’s late foray into the screen-printing technique.
What suggests that the playful arrangement of abstract forms may represent the natural world are the blades of glass discernible in the green pattern covering the large cut-out shape placed at the very bottom of the image. The hand-cut stencils are brought together to create a lively arrangement and many of them, indeed, resemble vegetal forms. Given its decorative appeal and powerful simplicity, the work creates links with the legacy of Henri Matisse, especially such works as Icarus (1943), The Blue Nude (1952), and The Snail (1953). Like Matisse, who saw cut-outs as a powerful alternative to painting, Hockney takes recourse to the world of shapes to arrive at a new way of experiencing an image.
