David Hockney

DAVID HOCKNEY (Bradford, United Kingdom, 1937).
"San Francisco Opera. Summer Festival Season," 1982.
Color offset lithographic poster on paper.
Unsigned.
Unspecified print run.
Published by Petersburg Press to mark the San Francisco Opera’s 1982 summer season.
Provenance: private collection, United Kingdom.
Measurements: 99.1 x 86.4 cm.

The poster reproduces a detail from the Bedlam scene in *The Rake’s Progress*, for which Hockney had originally designed the sets and costumes in 1975 for Igor Stravinsky’s opera. When the production was staged at the San Francisco Opera in 1982, this image became the motif for its poster: masked faces, graphic elements, patterns, and small symbols are distributed throughout the space using a palette of reds, turquoises, and blacks, translating the theatrical and deliberately artificial nature of the set design into the graphic plane.

David Hockney is one of the key figures in British art of the second half of the 20th century. Trained at the Royal College of Art in London, he developed a career spanning painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, and set design, maintaining a constant interest in the representation of space and perspective. His collaboration with opera and theater constitutes a significant facet of his body of work, running parallel to his celebrated portraits, landscapes, and Californian scenes. His work is widely represented in international collections, including the Tate.