| Tightly curated selection highlights iconic imagery, master printers and the evolving possibilities of editioned art “This is a very deliberate sale,” says Desiree Pakravan, Heritage’s Consignment Director of Prints and Multiples. “Every work was chosen for its relevance and its ability to represent a defining moment in an artist’s printmaking practice.” Among the leading highlights is David Hockney’s Hotel Acatlan, Two Weeks Later, from Moving Focus (1985), a vibrant diptych that exemplifies the artist’s ongoing exploration of perception and shifting viewpoints. Published by Tyler Graphics, the work belongs to Hockney’s celebrated Moving Focus series, in which space is fractured and reassembled across multiple panels. Held in the collections of both the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Tate, London, the composition reflects the artist’s fascination with how time, memory and vision intersect. A second Hockney, Lithographic Water Made of Lines, Crayon and Two Blue Washes (1978–80), offers a more distilled but equally compelling meditation on surface and illusion. Built from layered marks that evoke the shimmer of light across water, the work demonstrates Hockney’s mastery of the lithographic medium and his enduring engagement with the visual language of Southern California. “Hockney’s prints are always about more than what they depict,” says Pakravan. “They’re about how an image can be constructed, broken apart and experienced over time.” Warhol’s Wild Raspberries (1959), offered here as a complete artist’s book, reveals an earlier, more intimate facet of his practice. Created in collaboration with Suzie Frankfurt and featuring lettering by Warhol’s mother, Julia Warhola, the volume presents a whimsical, satirical take on mid-century culinary culture. With its hand-colored illustrations, gilt embellishments and playful, often absurd recipes, Wild Raspberries anticipates many of the themes that would define Warhol’s later work: repetition, surface and the performance of taste. From a different trajectory within postwar art, Joan Mitchell’s Trees IV (1992) stands as a powerful late-career statement. The monumental diptych, also produced with Tyler Graphics, translates Mitchell’s gestural, painterly language into the print medium without sacrificing its intensity. Sweeping passages of color and mark evoke landscape without describing it, placing the work in dialogue with both Abstract Expressionism and the technical possibilities of large-scale lithography. The sale’s contemporary selections extend that conversation into more recent decades. Raymond Pettibon’s Untitled (A Sea of Grinding Tectonic Plates…) (2008) pairs his characteristic text with a turbulent visual field, merging literary and graphic elements into a work that feels at once immediate and expansive. The result is a distinctly modern form of narrative printmaking, where language and image operate in tandem. Additional highlights include a selection of Pablo Picasso ceramics, which bridge the gap between functional object and sculptural form, as well as editions by Alex Katz that reflect the artist’s crisp, graphic sensibility and enduring influence on contemporary figuration. Throughout the auction, the presence of master printers and publishers, particularly Tyler Graphics, underscores the collaborative nature of printmaking at the highest level. These partnerships enabled artists to push the boundaries of scale, color and process, resulting in works that are as technically ambitious as they are visually compelling. “Printmaking has always been a space for experimentation,” Pakravan says. “What this sale shows is how artists across generations have used editions not as secondary works, but as primary expressions of their ideas.” IMAGES |
Saturday, April 11, 2026
Hockney, Warhol and Mitchell Lead Heritage's April 23 Prints & Multiples Auction
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