Name: An Evening At Christophers, Santa Monica
Brand: David Hockney
Rating: 5 (236 reviews)

Track auction value trend

The value of David Hockney's An Evening At Christophers, Santa Monica, a signed Photographic Print from 1982, is estimated to be worth between £13,500 and £20,000. This is a rare artwork with an auction history of one sale in May 2013. The edition size of this artwork is limited to 15.

Meaning & Analysis

Created by David Hockney in 1982, An Evening At Christophers, Santa Monica is a signed photographic print that belongs to a series of photo collages termed by the artist as ‘joiners’. By arranging visually striking sequences of images in joiners, Hockney gives expression to his long standing curiosity about questions of perspective and space.

In this photo collage, five people are seen sitting together in a warmly lit room, engaged in a conversation. A wide, panoramic-like view of the scene invites our gaze to move back and forth, from one side of the collage to the other. As Hockney’s intention in photo collages was to move away from a single-point perspective and introduce a variety of angles and layers, the viewer’s eyes travel the full length of the composition in an attempt to embrace the experimental composition. The experience of viewing the picture is, thus, linked strongly to the dynamics of participating in a group conversation. As in the real-life context, looking at the variety of pictures that were pieced together sets the viewer’s gaze in a perpetual movement from side to side. Hockney commented in this context: “The power of these joiners is that we know they are collages. […] Cubism made possible the idea of collage, of the superimposition of one time level on another, therefore making the surface anything but flat.”