At 88 years old, David Hockney continues to surprise the art world. This October, 17 of his iPad drawings from The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate will go under the hammer at Sotheby’s London during Frieze week, the largest offering of his digital works ever in a single auction. It’s a bold move from a living legend whose Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) fetched $90.3 million at Christie’s in 2018, once the most expensive painting by a living artist. If this doesn’t send shockwaves through the art world, nothing will.
The series, The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, marks his creative shift from Beverly Hills to Yorkshire’s winter landscapes and will be unveiled during Frieze London. While the artworks are stunning, fresh, and invigorating as ever, the story behind them is even more compelling. The Yorkshire-born artist lived intermittently in the U.S. before returning home. By 2009, Hockney had begun sketching on his iPhone and soon adopted the larger iPad, drawing daily with the Brushes app. He loved the immediacy, the layered transparency, and the freedom to work from bed at dawn or during the chill of winter, qualities that turned the device into his canvas. In his own words: “I draw flowers every day on my iPhone and send them to my friends, so they get fresh flowers every morning.”
According to Sotheby’s, after creating “four or five” iPad drawings of Woldgate in early January, between January and June he completed over 100 works and edited them down to 51. From that series, 17 are included in this sale, many of them among the very best. What began as a sweet morning gesture is now estimated at $100,000-$250,000 per print. Originating from a single collection, the works will be sold individually.
YYessica Marks, head of prints at Sotheby’s, observed: “Since the ’80s he experimented with tools you were more likely to find in an office than an artist’s studio, he would use the photocopier, fax machine, Photoshop.” The group carries a low total estimate of $2.5 million and will be sold on 17 October; proof that even the simplest morning sketches, when touched by Hockney’s hand, can blossom into masterpieces of lasting value.
