Name: I Say They Are
Brand: David Hockney
Rating: 4.9 (226 reviews)

Track auction value trend

The value of David Hockney’s I Say They Are (signed) is estimated to be worth between £2,100 and £3,150. This artwork has shown consistent value growth, with an average annual growth rate of 6%. This etching from 1977 has an auction history of 13 total sales since its entry to the market in April 2001. In the last 12 months, the average selling price was £2,000, with a total of 1 artwork sold. Over the past five years, the hammer price has varied from £1,298 in January 2020 to £3,770 in January 2022. The average return to the seller over this period was £2,239. The edition size of this artwork is limited to 200.

Auction Date

Auction House

Artwork

Hammer Price

Return to Seller

Buyer Paid

October 2024

Rago - United States

I Say They Are - Signed Print

September 2022

Phillips London - United Kingdom

I Say They Are - Signed Print

January 2022

Phillips London - United Kingdom

I Say They Are - Signed Print

January 2020

Skinner, Boston - United States

I Say They Are - Signed Print

October 2019

Rosebery's Fine Art Auctioneers - United Kingdom

I Say They Are - Signed Print

March 2018

Forum Auctions London - United Kingdom

I Say They Are - Signed Print

March 2017

Forum Auctions London - United Kingdom

I Say They Are - Signed Print

Meaning & Analysis

Playing with technique and colour as much as subject matter and style, I Say They Are is a 1977 etching by David Hockney which was originally published in an edition of 200 as part of The Blue Guitar series.

I Say They Are features disparate elements thrown together in a striking composition in order to highlight their discordance. While mostly made up of monochrome line drawings, the work is dominated by four drips of ink in red, blue, yellow, green and black that appear like melting olympic rings above the fuzzy rug that marks the floor of the scene. Here Hockney appears to be experimenting not just with juxtaposition but the technique of sugar lift aquatint which he learned in Paris while under the tutelage of Aldo Crommelynck who had been Picasso's master printer.

While previously his etchings had been mostly monochrome, with perhaps the odd dab of red ink in series such as A Rake’s Progress, with The Blue Guitar we see Hockney creating softly coloured scenes from a much wider palette. Blue of course dominates, but here the colours are fairly equally distributed and heavily saturated, moving away from the more tonal works in the series. Reflecting on these strange compositions, Hockney said that the prints in the series were never intended to illustrate the poem of the same name by Stevens. Instead, he explained, ‘Like the poem, they are about transformations within art as well as the relation between reality and the imagination, so these are pictures and different styles of representation juxtaposed and reflected and dissolved within the same frame’.