Office Chair is a quintessential example of David Hockney’s playful exploration of everyday objects, translated into a bold, graphic language that fuses humour, immediacy, and technical experimentation. Created in 1986 using an office colour photocopier—a commercial device repurposed as an artistic tool—the work belongs to the pioneering series of “home made prints” in which Hockney challenged conventional printmaking by embracing new technology and the aesthetics of mechanical reproduction.

The composition depicts an office chair rendered with exaggerated, almost cartoon-like proportions. Sweeping arcs of bright blue define the chair’s structure, while the seat and back are articulated as dense, gestural black forms that retain the energy of hand-made mark-making despite their reproduction through a copier. The green elliptical ground establishes a sense of position, and the scattered red and blue elements animate the negative space, giving the work the lively spontaneity of a sketch while maintaining a clear formal rhythm.

Visually, the piece exemplifies Hockney’s delight in line, shape, and colour, but conceptually it underscores his abiding interest in perception, technology, and image-making. By transforming a mundane office chair into a vibrant subject and elevating a photocopier into a printing press, he collapses distinctions between fine art and the mechanically produced image—anticipating later dialogues around digital art, appropriation, and reproducibility.

The work’s playful immediacy is balanced by its rarity: issued in a small edition of just forty impressions, each print reflects Hockney’s hands-on engagement with the machine’s capabilities, embracing its imperfections as part of the aesthetic. As such, Office Chair occupies a distinct place within his oeuvre, marking a transitional moment in which the artist expanded his printmaking vocabulary and opened new possibilities for image-making through technology.