David Hockney
Woldgate Woods, 24, 25 and 26 October, 2006
Woldgate Woods, 24, 25 and 26 October 2006, the first work from David Hockney’s famed Woldgate Woods series to appear at auction will come up at Sotheby’s contemporary art evening sale in New York on November 17. Measuring over three and half meters in diameter it is estimated at $9-12 million. With a retrospective at Tate Britain opening in February 2017 Sotheby’s reckon this could establish a record for Hockney at auction. The work captivated audiences in London at the Royal Academy blockbuster 2012 exhibition David Hockney: A Bigger Picture.
Throughout 2006, Hockney executed a limited series of paintings of the Woldgate Woods in his native Yorkshire, charting the changes in light and colour as the seasons passed. Limited by the size of the canvas he was able to fit through the staircase at his Bridlington studio, he devised a method of using multiple canvases in order to achieve the desired scale. Woldgate Woods, 24, 25 and 26 October 2006, capturing the autumnal colors of East Yorkshire, is composed using six of these canvases. The huge public and critical success of this body of work has led to this quiet corner in the north east of England becoming known as ‘Hockney Country’, with the local tourist board even creating a Hockney Trail inspired by the locations immortalized in the series.