Mexican Hotel Garden

This signed print by British artist David Hockney is entitled Mexican Hotel Garden. Issued in an edition of 65, it is an etching work from 1984 and recalls the similarly abstracted pieces, View Of Hotel Well I, View Of Hotel Well II and View Of Hotel Well III. Unlike these garishly colourful works, Mexican Hotel Garden is rendered in monochrome, and is an example of Hockney’s signature line drawing techniques, visible in many of his other etchings. Eschewing traditional linear perspective, the work is testament to the artist’s deconstructive approach to image making, as explored in his Photo Collages, and his long love for the Cubist movement and Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. Commenting on Cubist perspective, Hockney once said, ‘Have you ever noticed how when you look at things close up, you sometimes shut one eye – that is, you make yourself like a camera?…  The Cubists, you know, didn’t shut their eyes.’ Recalling the painterly works he produced in the same year, Hockney once commented, ‘I was trying to create a painting where the viewer’s eye could be made to move in certain ways, stop in certain places, move on, and in so doing reconstruct the space across time for itself… The problem was how to prevent the eye from stopping, from getting stuck.’ Although Mexican Hotel Garden is an etching, it exudes a sense of a similar approach.