Views Of Hotel Well II

This signed lithograph by venerated British artist David Hockney. Together with View Of Hotel Well I and III, this work takes the central courtyard of the Hotel Acatlán in Mexico as its subject matter. Like these other prints, it can easily be digested as a study for the much larger diptych, Hotel Acatlan: Two Weeks Later, produced – as its title suggests – two weeks after Hockney’s visit, on two canvases with oil paints, or the 1985 work, A Walk Around The Hotel Courtyard, Acatlan. Whilst the courtyard of the Hotel Acatlán is a recurring subject in Hockney’s work of 1984-5, the artist never stayed there as a paying guest: rather, he discovered the courtyard when problems with his car forced him to stop over on the way to Mexico City, the Mexican capital. Like these other works, View Of Hotel Well II makes use of reverse perspective, a technique Hockney had experimented with at length in his composite Photo Collages. There is a dynamism to this piece which reflects Hockney’s own movement along the long cloister-like corridors of the hotel’s internal courtyard. Like much of Hockney’s other work, it is influenced by the Cubist movement and the works of Hockney’s idol, Pablo Picasso.