Simplified Faces (State I)

This signed print by much loved British artist David Hockney was issued in 1973 in a limited edition of 30. Around this period, Hockney had spent a large amount of time producing The Weather Series – an edition of minimal yet evocative prints depicting a variety of weather events. Produced in large part following a trip Hockney made to Japan, there is a loneliness to these images which some have identified as product of the artist’s then recent breakup with artist and onetime partner Peter Schlesinger, the subject of some of his most iconic painterly works, namely A Bigger Splash (1967). Absent of any figurative depiction of friends and recurrent sitters, such as Celia Birtwell, The Weather Series bears thematic similarity to the portrait-based work, Simplified Faces (State I), despite this latter’s evocation of an entirely divergent subject matter. Faces remain the principal subject of the work, yet somehow ‘faces’ – in their traditional sense – remain absent. Instead, cartoon-like masks drawn from both memory and fantasy are propped up against static, inanimate objects which betray their spiritlessness. Beneath these geometric evocations of human features, text serves an explanatory function. ‘Simplified’, as the piece’s title suggests, these faces are reduced, by text, to emotionless form.