Hockney to Haring: Iconic Editions at Auction

On April 20-25, Waddington's will be hosting its Editions auction, featuring over 150 lots of editioned work by International and Canadian artists. Highlights include works by esteemed names like Keith Haring, David Hockney, Helen Frankenthaler, Christopher Wool, Roy Lichtenstein, Sonia Delaunay, Bridget Riley, Sol Lewitt, Yoshimoto Nara, Brice Marden, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Alex Colville, and more.

Here are five editions not to miss:

David Hockney's most iconic motif is arguably the swimming pool, which he first was inspired by during a trip to Los Angeles in the 1960s. He would later settle in California and the swimming pool became recurrent in his work, most famously in Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), which sold for $90.3 million at Christie’s New York in 2018. The pool was evocative of the fantasy and hedonism Hockey was struck by in L.A. and thus became his symbol of the city. On offer here is the lithograph titled Paper Pools, Pool Made with Paper and Blue Ink for Book from 1980, one of Hockney's most important pool prints.

Another iconic work is Keith Haring's screenprint Plate 4 from 'Pop Shop 1' (1987). In 1986, Haring opened his 'Pop Shop' where he sold clothing and accessories decorated with his pop art meets graffiti style, which made his art accessible to all. This screenprint, showing two of Haring's colorful figures in movement, was part of the first Pop Shop series.

Op Art is on display in Bridget Riley's screenprint Two Blues from 2003. The contemporary British artist, now in her 90s, continually explored the relationship between geometry, optics and color in her eye-catching works.

Helen Frankenthaler was also deeply conscious of color synthesis and juxtapositions. She was known for her soak stain technique, which she achieved by mixing oil with turpentine to make the paint more translucent, resembling watercolors. Southern Exposure (2005), a screenprint on wove paper, encapsulates Frankenthaler's soak stain technique, with its bleeds of ochre, rust, lemon and thread of green.

Canadian artist Alex Colville was the founder of Maritime Realism, capturing the world around him in the Maritimes region of Canada in a hyperrealistic way. His Black Cat (1996), a screenprint on wove paper, is distinct for its rendering of the cat's fur, behind which a man's bespectacled eyes loom.

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