There can be no doubting how much the Artmarket Gallery’s customers and friends love the work of David Hockney. The Bradford-born artist’s ‘definitive visual autobiography’, A Bigger Book, is an epic limited edition tome that weighs in at 35kg and takes two men to move it; copies have been on sale at the Cottingham gallery for just over a year now. And it has sold more copies there than at any other gallery in the UK outside London.
Marlene Taschen, MD of book’s publishers, art specialists TASCHEN, says: “I am very happy about our collaboration with the Artmarket gallery, a shining star in the North!
“The dedication to TASCHEN projects such as David Hockney: A Bigger Book has been fantastic, and we are now excited to rev up our engines again together with Robert, Michelle, and their team for our new monumental limited edition, Ferrari! The sky is the limit with partners like Artmarket, and I look forward to seeing where we go next.”
You can find out more about Ferrari! here, but back to the Hockney book – it is, of course, a thing of spectacular beauty, cataloguing the technicolour career of the man who is probably the world’s most famous living artist from the 1950s to the present day. But it’s also looking like being a canny investment. The first 1,000 books (now all sold) from the edition of 10,000 cost £4,000 each. But each came with a limited edition print (print A with the first 250 books, print B with the second 250, and so on).
One of those prints, Untitled no 329, depicting a glass vase of pink flowers, sold at auction in London for over £10,000 last year – and that was for the print alone. Artmarket gallery director Robert Power was recently delighted to source a Hockney print, Pool Made with Paper and Blue Ink for Book (MCA Tokyo 234), for a collector in Florida, a piece which had doubled in value in the last five years.
And with a recent Hockney original achieving a record price for the artist at auction (click here for more on that), it seems there’s never been a better time to buy work by one of Yorkshire’s favourite sons. A Bigger Book, complete with bespoke stand designed by Mark Newson and published by specialist art publishers Taschen, is available at the Artmarket gallery for £2,250 – although that price may go up as the book begins to sell out and demand increases, as Robert expects it to by the end of this year: hurry if you want one.
And the Artmarket gallery has a selection of other work by David Hockney, so keep an eye on the website if you’re interested – they don’t hang about!