David Hockney (1937-2026) is one of the most influential British artists of the twentieth century and is arguably the most important European contributor to the Pop Art movement of the 1960s.
This elaborate and energetic work reflects an important moment in Hockney’s artistic development. In February 1983, Hockney travelled to Japan with Gregory Evans to speak at a conference on paper in art. The trip profoundly informed his experiments with photography. Hockney had been working with photo for over a decade at this point. During his stay, he began producing some of his most ambitious photographic “joiners." To create these, he photographed subjects from multiple positions and assembled the resulting images into complex, fractured compositions. These dramatic and curious works were a fascinating hybrid of cubism, collage and photo.
His encounters with Japanese gardens and traditional East Asian picture-making led him to reconsider the Western conventions of fixed-point perspective, encouraging a form of image-making that could encompass movement, duration, and multiple viewpoints. "The Ashtray, Sunday Morning, Tokyo" belongs directly to this pivotal period, when Hockney was using photography not simply to record the world but to question how it is perceived. The resulting tension between the everyday subject and the radical structure of the image is central to the work’s appeal.
The image is at once intimate and disorienting: time, movement, and perception are made visible through the seams between individual exposures. Hockney’s “joiners” challenge photography’s conventional claims to objectivity, proposing instead an image that more closely approximates the way we actually experience the world. This artwork is characteristic of Hockney’s broader practice, in which ordinary subjects become occasions to reconsider the nature of looking itself.
Similar “joiners” can be found in the collections of The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; The Art Institute of Chicago; and the Milwaukee Art Museum.
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"Ashtray, Sunday Morning, Tokyo"
Febrauary 1983
Photographic collage on paperboard laid on panel
Titled, dated, numbered, and signed in white ink, lower edge
Number 10 from an edition of 15
55"H 53"W (work)
57"H 55"W (framed)
Overall good condition. Fading consistent with age. Full report on request.
Literature:
Nishimura Gallery, David Hockney: New Work with a Camera, p. 14
Babior, Structured Vision: Collage and Sequential Photography, p. 10
Clark, The World is Round: Contemporary Panoramas, p. 62
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