Homage to Hockney

Name: Ragnar Digital, LLC
Price range: $

Lillian Feldman Schwartz

1988

Cibachrome
b&w photograph on kodak paper
20"x16"
AP

Description

Lillian Schwartz made this work as a gift for David Hockney on the occasion of his retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Using the early image-editing software Pico, she blended sections of a photograph of Hockney into rectangular bands of gray tones that radiate out from his left eye. If the viewer unfocuses their gaze, the concentric circles of black and gray converge into a recognizable portrait of Hockney that emerges from the shadowy background. Schwartz created the optical illusion with the help of Gerard Holzmann, a computer scientist and researcher at Bell Labs. She later wrote that it was inspired by Leon Harmon and Ken Knowlton’s experiments with perception. Like their famous Computer Nude (1967)_, Homage to Hockney _removes information that the viewer’s eye adds back based on what remains.