The Studio, March 28th 1985

This signed photographic print by British artist David Hockney is entitled The Studio, March 28th, 1995. In 1995, created an installation entitled Snails Space With Vari-Lites (1995-1996). The large-scale piece was exhibited at Washington D.C.’s Smithsonian Museum in the same year. As in the signed print series Snails Space, this print captures a birds-eye-view view of this mixed media installation piece, a striking and remarkably unique element of Hockney’s wider œuvre that makes an extended use of abstraction. In this particular print, a smaller study positioned on an easel echoes the forms of mixed media piece, assembled on the rear wall and floor of the studio. Captured by a photograph, Hockney’s interest in this scene suggests some kind of rhetorical exercise concerning spectatorship, and the mise-en-abyme effect. The limits of the canvas are no obstruction to the willed distortion and elision of boundaries between artwork, gallery space, and photograph. Commenting on the genre-bending nature of the piece depicted in this print series, Hockney once said: ‘The original painting is on two canvases measuring 84 by 240 inches, but I decided to continue the painting on the floor immediately in front of it, so we constructed a three-dimensional extension using real cubes, cones, and cylinders’.