David Hockney|Moving Focus

'Moving Focus' was Hockney's largest and most ambitious series of colour lithographs, and in it he took his challenge to single-point perspective into print. The phrase that names it is credited to a chapter of George Rowley's 'Principles of Chinese Painting', a book Hockney (1937–2026) read in 1983 and one that changed how he thought about space. Chinese scroll paintings, which reveal a landscape as they unroll, and Picasso's Cubism gave him models for a scene seen by someone moving through it. Looking back in 1988 at a painting he had made in 1980, he said "it was all about movement and shifting views, although at the time I didn't yet fully understand the implications of such a moving focus."

Drawing in the courtyard

In 1984 Hockney's car broke down on the road from Mexico City to Oaxaca, and he stayed at a small hotel in Acatlán built around a courtyard with a well at its centre. He went back later that year with Tyler, who had him draw in the courtyard on sheets of Mylar, a semi-transparent plastic, rather than in the workshop. Hockney used one sheet for each colour and could see the layers together as he worked. The drawings were then transferred to printing plates and printed in New York State. The three 'Hotel Acatlán' prints each run across two sheets, nearly two metres wide in all, so the courtyard unfolds from side to side. Writing in 1984 about the painting of the courtyard he was then making, Hockney said it had "so many different perspectives that you are forced to move your eye constantly over the surface of the canvas."

Rooms, chairs and sitters

'Tyler Dining Room' uses reverse perspective, so that the room opens out towards the viewer instead of narrowing to a vanishing point. The portraits carry the idea into the sheet itself. 'An Image Of Gregory', of his friend Gregory Evans, splits both the sitter and the frame across two sheets, and 'An Image of Celia' builds the figure of Celia Birtwell, another friend, from collaged parts. Cubism and Hockney's own opera designs both fed into the series.

At auction

At Phillips London on 19 September 2026, 'Tyler Dining Room' and 'An Image Of Gregory' each sold for £141,900. Another impression of 'Tyler Dining Room' had made £40,640 at the same house in September 2024. 'Amaryllis In Vase' made £138,600 at Phillips London in January 2023, and an artist's proof of 'Hotel Acatlán - Two Weeks Later' made $140,200 at Bonhams Los Angeles in March 2024. The smaller sheets sold for far less: 'The Perspective Lesson' made £11,430 at Phillips London in September 2024. All these figures include fees.

Before and after

'Moving Focus' followed the '23 Lithographs 1978–1980 (Tyler Graphics)', drawn at the same workshop in Bedford Village. The early 'Moving Focus' sheets carry the workshop's Bedford Village blindstamp. Others carry the stamp of Mount Kisco, where Tyler moved Tyler Graphics into a purpose-built workshop in 1987. Hockney returned to Mount Kisco for the 'Tyler Graphics Lithographs (1990–91)', which turned from rooms and sitters to still life, the sea and abstraction.