Gallery News

Miami Artisti Ahol Sniffs Glue Signing first Gregg Shienbaum Fine Art Edition “Balls To The Walls”

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Gregg Shienbaum Fine Art is pleased to present its first edition with Miami Artist Ahol Sniffs Glue.

Limited to only 30 pieces and is laser cut on walnut wood.

The Eye Pattern is cut out all the way through. So what ever the background color of the wall you choose to hang it on is the color the eyes will be. It can also be framed as well.

We did not want to do a regular print on paper, we wanted to do something more unique and more substantial.

The details of this new edition are below as well as photos of the work and of Ahol signing the piece.

  • Ahol Sniffs Glue
  • Balls To The Walls
  • 2015
  • laser cut out on walnut wood
  • 32 x 24 x 1/8 in.
  • Edition of 30
  • Signed and numbered
  • $650

* please note that the grain of the wood varies from piece to piece.

Untitled

WOW! – Work Of the Week – Shepard Fairey “Obey ’04 (Wage Peace)”

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Retro Series - Obey 04

Shepard Fairey aka OBEY

OBEY ’04 (Wage Peace)

2006

Screenprint

42 x 30 in.

Edition of 89

Pencil signed and numbered

—

ABOUT THIS WORK:

Shepard Fairey’s background is rooted in American skate and punk rock culture, with his work born out of a combination of a graffiti aesthetic and Pop art sensibilities. Straddling the divide between the fine art world and the street art world, Fairey—despite his massive popularity—has had to wait to be accepted by the more traditional art world. His higher profile has also, in turn, gotten him into some serious problems with law enforcement (he recently faced felony charges in Detroit, despite eighteen prior arrests for illegal tagging). Fairey said of this conflict: “To some people street art is vandalism, to others it’s gentrification, and either of those could be considered more legit than the other depending on your perspective“.

His artwork stands out in both the street and in a gallery setting. Although he is still viewed primarily as a street artist despite his indisputable commercial success. Fairey’s use of powerful, accessible images and messages display an influence from early advertising, alternative culture, and Pop artists like Andy Warhol. This combination of clear messaging and graphic compositions gives his work a broad appeal that speaks to a wide cross section of society. “Street art has to stand out from the static, and contend with the metabolism of the city“. He evokes communist propaganda, Barbara Kruger style advertorials and Jasper Johns subversion.

Fairey’s work also has a strong political component. He was already well known for his OBEY Andre the Giant tags and stickers before he created the image Obama Hope in 2008, a block-colored portrait of the presidential hopeful Barack Obama. The image, now world-famous, was subsequently adopted as the official presidential campaign image and became probably his most famous image. In addition, he also created a poster in support of Ai Weiwei’s—now successful—campaign to regain his passport in 2014.

Early in his career, during the OBEY sticker campaign that made him famous, Fairey seriously questioned the nature of his imagery, firmly establishing himself as an outspoken counter-culture figure, often addressing issues of war, human rights, ecology, and politics.

His art can be explained as an experiment in Phenomenology. Heidegger describes Phenomenology as “the process of letting things manifest themselves.” Phenomenology attempts to enable people to see clearly something that is right before their eyes but obscured; things that are so taken for granted that they are muted by abstract observation. Because people are not used to seeing advertisements or propaganda for which the product or motive is not obvious, frequent and novel encounters with this art provoke thought and possible frustration, nevertheless revitalizing the viewer’s perception and attention to detail.

A perfect example of this is the work entitled Obey ’04, from the Retro Series. The silhouette of the soldier is a strong graphic form against the red background. Here we can see all the typical elements that characterize Fairey’s art: red, beige and black colors, modern and current subjects and the predominant presence of the graphic element.

Also present is the image Fairey became known for, the Andre The Giant face. This is represented by the soldier holding up this iconic image. We also see it in that sort of mandala shaped like a star in the upper right, a true symbol of the artist.

Fairey, who is definitely a pacifist, creates work that speak of peace and war, conveying his concern with politics.Here we can see the words “wage peace” instead of the typical “wage war”, and a flower inside the rifle instead of bullets.

The Obey ’04 from the Retro Series was created to commemorate the 20 year anniversary of the artwork of OBEY. The series was first released for the opening of Shepard’s 20 years Retrospective at the ICA Boston.

WOW! – Work Of the Week – Andy Warhol “Life Savers”

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Life Savers

 

Andy Warhol

Life Savers, from Ads FS II.353

1985

Screenprint on Lenox Museum Board

38 x 38 in.

Edition of 190

Pencil signed and numbered

__

ABOUT THIS WORK:

Although Pop Art began in Great Britain in the late 1950s, in America it was given its greatest impetus during the 1960s. The term “Pop Art” was officially introduced in December 1962: the occasion was a “Symposium on Pop Art” organized by the Museum of Modern Art.

As the British viewed American popular culture imagery from a somewhat removed perspective, their views were often instilled with romantic, sentimental and humorous overtones. By contrast, American artists, bombarded every day with the diversity of mass-produced imagery, produced work that was generally more bold and aggressive.

Pop Art presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular culture such as advertising and news. In pop art, material is sometimes visually removed from its known context, isolated, and/or combined with unrelated material. The concept of “popular art” refers not as much to the art itself as to the attitudes behind the art.

Pop Art employs aspects of mass culture, such as advertising, comic books and mundane cultural objects. One of its aims is to use images of popular culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any culture, most often through the use of irony. It is also associated with the use of mechanical means of reproduction or rendering techniques such as screenprints or silkscreens.

Among the early and most famous artists that shaped the Pop Art movement, the most iconic certainly is Andy Warhol. He has been the greatest pop artist and the one who best developed this concept in his work.

His beginnings as a product marketer heavily influenced his artistic career, in which he glamorized and transformed everyday objects, like soup cans and cleaning supplies, into works of art. So in the 1980’s when Feldman Fine Arts commissioned Warhol to create his “ADS” series, Warhol was in his element. The Ads Portfolio of prints by Andy Warhol is one of his most sought after and iconic sets of prints and it contains the “Life Savers”. This Andy Warhol portfolio includes images of James Dean and the Paramount Logo. The Ads portfolio is made up of ten screen prints on Lenox Museum Board by Andy Warhol. These images that make up Warhol’s ADS Series reflect Warhol’s fascination with American consumerism.

This is a particularly colorful original work of art by this legendary artist. The five flavors candies were first introduced in 1912, coming in different colors and flavors but same shape and size. These candies are still sold today. This screenprint is a summary of Pop Art: bright colors, use of advertising, screenprint technique, presence of slogans and everyday life goods, a transformation of something normal and banal in a high-quality artwork.

The essence of Andy Warhol’s art was to make no distinction between fine art and commercial art used in magazine illustrations, comic books, record albums or advertising campaigns. Warhol once expressed his thinking in one sentence: “When you think about it, department stores are kind of like museums”.

ABOUT THE ARTIST:

He was one of the most enigmatic figures in American art. His work became the definitive expression of a culture obsessed with images. He was surrounded by a coterie of beautiful bohemians with names like Viva, Candy Darling, and Ultra Violet. He held endless drug- and sex-filled parties, through which he never stopped working. He single-handedly confounded the distinctions between high and low art. His films are pivotal in the formation of contemporary experimental art and pornography. He spent the final years of his life walking around the posh neighborhoods of New York with a plastic bag full of hundred dollar bills, buying jewelry and knick knacks. His name was Andy Warhol, and he changed the nature of art forever.

Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola on August 6, 1928, in Pittsburgh. He received his B.F.A. from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh, in 1949. That same year, he moved to New York, where he soon became successful as a commercial artist and illustrator. During the 1950s, Warhol’s drawings were published in Glamour and other magazines and displayed in department stores. He became known for his illustrations of I. Miller shoes. In 1952, the Hugo Gallery in New York presented a show of Warhol’s illustrations for Truman Capote’s writings.

During this time, Warhol had also been working on a series of pictures separate from the advertisements and illustrations. It was this work that he considered his serious artistic endeavor. Though the paintings retained much of the style of popular advertising, their motivation was just the opposite. The most famous of the paintings of this time are the thirty-two paintings of Campbell soup cans. With these paintings, and other work that reproduced Coca-Cola bottles, Superman comics, and other immediately recognizable popular images, Warhol was mirroring society’s obsessions. Where the main concern of advertising was to slip into the unconscious and unrecognizably evoke a feeling of desire, Warhol’s work was meant to make the viewer actually stop and look at the images that had become invisible in their familiarity. These ideas were similarly being dealt with by artists such as Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Rauschenberg – and came to be known as Pop Art.

Throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, Warhol produced work at an amazing rate. He embraced a mode of production similar to that taken on by the industries he was mimicking, and referred to his studio as “The Factory.” The Factory was not only a production center for Warhol’s paintings, silk-screens, and sculptures, but also a central point for the fast-paced high life of New York in the ’60s. Warhol’s obsession with fame, youth, and personality drew the most wild and interesting people to The Factory throughout the years. Among the regulars were Mick Jagger, Martha Graham, Lou Reed, and Truman Capote. For many, Warhol was a work of art in himself, reflecting back the basic desires of an consumerist American culture. He saw fame as the pinnacle of modern consumerism and reveled in it the way artists a hundred years before reveled in the western landscape. His oft-repeated statement that “every person will be world-famous for fifteen minutes” was an incredible insight into the growing commodification of everyday life.

By the mid-’60s, Warhol had become one of the most famous artists, in the world. He continued, however, to baffle the critics with his aggressively groundbreaking work. His paintings were primarily concerned with getting the viewer to look at something for longer than they otherwise would.

Throughout the ’70s and ’80s, Warhol produced hundreds of portraits, mostly in silk screen. His images of Liza Minnelli, Jimmy Carter, Albert Einstein, Elizabeth Taylor, and Philip Johnson express a more subtle and expressionistic side of his work.

 Following routine gall bladder surgery, Andy Warhol died February 22, 1987. After his burial in Pittsburgh, his friends and associates organized a memorial mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York that was attended by more than 2,000 people.

2015-11-17

WOW! – Work Of the Week – Keith Haring “Free South Africa #2”

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Keith Haring

Untitled (Free South Africa #2)

1985

Lithograph

32 x 40 in.

Edition of 60

Signed, dated and numbered in pencil

__

ABOUT THIS WORK:

Though many associate the artist Keith Haring with his seemingly innocuous images of barking dogs, crawling babies, beating hearts and flying saucers, his work often tackled social justice issues – from nuclear proliferation, to AIDS, to the environment to racial and income inequality. He was very political and engaged in many of the relevant questions and issues of his time and talked about heavy themes such as racism and apartheid, which Haring tirelessly rallied against— notably printing and distributing 20,000 “Free South Africa” posters in Central Park in 1985.

This work, titled Free South Africa #2, is part of a trilogy which shows us the relationship between black and white people (actually black majority and white minority) in South Africa, during years of repression and inequality, when racial segregation was the rule: it was called “apartheid” (literally “separation”). The black figure in this picture is bigger than the white one, symbolizing the great disparity between the black majority and a few white people that had the power to rule the country during those years. To convey the inequality of the white minority’s powerful grasp on the black majority, the white figure has tied a rope around the black man’s neck. To show hope and signs of defeat, Haring depicts the gigantic black figure, crushing or stomping out this inequality, marked by a red X.  

The figures are placed within the rectangle with Haring’s typical balance and sense of the space, the relationship between the busy and the empty space in the image is tempered, despite of the too different sizes of the figures. The lines stemming from the figures inform us of the movement and the rage of the black man and the worry and inevitable destiny of the white figure, who is about to be crushed.

Using the words of Julia Gruen, a friend of Haring’s and executive director of the Keith Haring Foundation, “…we can feel that image really in the simplest possible way spoke to a kind of political activism. . . It’s really about fighting against oppression. It’s about bucking the system. It’s about questioning authority”.

Haring’s genius was his ability to communicate very directly, very immediately through his chosen symbols and iconography, he could reduce a work to the fewest forms possible to make his point, and racism was an issue that was of paramount concern to Haring. Activism was at the heart of his artistic practice. This is something that is often forgotten or overlooked because the typical whimsical images that have saturated pop culture, and are the ones that are easiest for the masses to consume. However, the joyfulness and a wonderful lightheartedness in his work, is a message of his vision and strong hope of a better world to come.

ABOUT THE ARTIST:

Keith Haring found a thriving alternative art community that was developing outside the gallery and museum system, in the downtown streets, the subways and spaces in clubs and former dance halls. Here he became friends with fellow artists Kenny Scharf and Jean-Michel Basquiat, as well as the musicians, performance artists and graffiti writers that comprised the burgeoning art community. Haring was swept up in the energy and spirit of this scene and began to organize and participate in exhibitions and performances at Club 57 and other alternative venues.

Haring was able to push his own youthful impulses toward a singular kind of graphic expression based on the primacy of the line.

In 1980, Haring found a highly effective medium that allowed him to communicate with the wider audience he desired, when he noticed the unused advertising panels covered with matte black paper in a subway station. He began to create drawings in white chalk upon these blank paper panels throughout the subway system. Between 1980 and 1985, Haring produced hundreds of these public drawings in rapid rhythmic lines, sometimes creating as many as forty “subway drawings” in one day. This seamless flow of images became familiar to New York commuters, who often would stop to engage the artist when they encountered him at work. The subway became, as Haring said, a “laboratory” for working out his ideas and experimenting with his simple lines.

Between 1980 and 1986, Haring achieved international recognition and participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions. His first solo exhibition in New York, held at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in 1982, was immensely popular and received critical acclaim. During this period, he participated in highly renowned international survey exhibitions such as Documenta 7 in Kassel Germany, the São Paulo Biennial and the Whitney Biennial. Haring completed numerous public projects in the first half of the 80’s.

Throughout his career, Haring devoted much of his time to public works, which often carried social messages. He produced more than 50 public artworks between 1982 and 1989, in dozens of cities around the world, many of which were created for charities, hospitals, children’s day care centers and orphanages

Haring was diagnosed with AIDS in 1988.  Haring enlisted his imagery during the last years of his life to speak about his own illness and generate activism and awareness about AIDS.

During a brief but intense career that spanned the 1980s, Haring’s work was featured in over 100 solo and group exhibitions.  By expressing universal concepts of birth, death, love, sex and war, using a primacy of line and directness of message, Haring was able to attract a wide audience and assure the accessibility and staying power of his imagery, which has become a universally recognized visual language of the 20th century.

Keith Haring died of AIDS related complications at the age of 31 on February 16, 1990.

Since his death, he has been the subject of several international retrospectives. The work of Keith Haring can be seen today in the exhibitions and collections of major museums around the world.

Keith Haring Narrated

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Statue of Liberty

Keith Haring
1986
Silkscreen
37 1/2 x 28 1/4 in.
Artist’s Proof (A.P.) edition of 25
Pencil signed and numbered

—

KEITH HARING

NARRATED

A selection of works from 1982-1990

12 NOVEMBER – 14 DECEMBER

Opening night on Thrusday, November 12

From 6.00 pm

Keith Haring was and remains an irreplaceable symbol of the freedom that ate metropolitan streets and drank the night air of that wonderfully accursed place, the East Village.  His art work has a marvelous capacity to convey the spiritual anarchy of an artist outside the normal confines.  Haring has become the one most loved artists by the younger generations on every continent.  He has gained an indefinable number of admirers who can be found everywhere, whether among the ranks of the wealthy and middle class, or on the impersonal edges of our cities, where walls and graffiti form the open air salon of the young.  It is sobering to reflect the extent to which an artist, year after year, is able to exert an influence on the culture of vast numbers of people.

Haring was shaped by the street spirit of an overflowing and uncontrollable phenomenon of the eighties, know as “Street Art”.   However, it is important to look at Haring’s whole body of work, and not just his graffiti work.   Keith Haring seems to have been the spokesman for a “political” art with a powerful capacity for communication.  His paintings on canvas, chalk drawings on black paper, and his graphic works were to become a far more subtle means of communication than the sledgehammer methods of graffiti on a grand scale. 

Effortless, but also in the depth of its own signs, brought to the highest degree of formal childishness, Haring’s work shows how synthesis is not just the beginning, but also the endpoint of any progressive evolution.  Beyond the aesthetic style, beats and throbs the morality of the artist, ready to attack the eyes, the heart, and the head of every observer.

The messages are easy to decode, but have behind them, a long path of ethical development that has endowed their contents with great structural force.  Frenzied consumption, global dehumanization of the human race, increasing levels of pollution, sexual prohibitions, prejudice against homosexuals, and social phobias amidst systematic automatisms and robotisms, are just a few of the many messages that Keith Haring’s art works deals with.

The genius of his artwork not only lies in the messages, but also in the brilliant manner in which Haring tackled these risky subjects.  The emergence of animals at the center of new and universal concepts of purity, children who find their way to the hub of the metropolitan scene, symbolic pyramids, cheerful pregnancies, flying angels, amorous couplings, these are just some of the images that Keith Haring’s whole course of development has clung to this double track of themes, that his irony turns into a single, pictorial body where gaiety and softness becomes the radiant surface of a complex body of work.

2015-11-03

WOW! – Work of the Week – Ellsworth Kelly “Blue Green Black Red” 10/13/15

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Ellsworth Kelly – Blue Green Black Red

Ellsworth Kelly
Blue Green Black Red
1971
Offset lithograph
29 3/4  x 27 1/4 in.
Edition of 100
Pencil signed & numbered

About This Work:

For more than fifty years, Ellsworth Kelly has worked to refine elements of the observed world into rigorous abstraction with a bold clarity and elegance.  “My work has always been about vision, the process of seeing,” he notes. “Each work of art is a fragment of a larger context… . I’ve always been interested in things that I see that don’t make sense out of context, that lead you into something else.”  

Maintaining a persistent focus on the dynamic relationships between shape, form and color, Kelly challenges viewers’ conceptions of space. He intends for viewers to experience his artwork with instinctive, physical responses to the work’s structure, color, and surrounding space, rather than with contextual or interpretive analysis.  

His flat, immaculate compositions of pure line, simple forms, and saturated, unmodulated color are, in essence, found images, distillations of architectural details, shadows, plants, and other subtle forms that often might be overlooked. The contour of a leaf, the arch of a bridge and its reflection in water, and the soft curve of a hillside seen from the road have inspired paintings, sculptures, and prints alike.  His art work represent a subjective interpretation of reality, rather than a descriptive copy of it.

Kelly’s arrangement of the complementary colors, which work to intensify one another at their intersections, is also an essential component of the work.  In the 1971 lithograph Blue, Green, Black, and Red rectangles are laid, one on top of the other, in arrangements that suggest fragments of a remembered landscape.   Perhaps it is several stories of a building, or perhaps a billboard looked, from a certain angle, or the way a shadow once fell.

Ordinary memories such as these, Kelly has said, prompt many of his works. ”As we move, looking at hundreds of different things, we see many different kinds of shapes. Roofs, walls, ceilings are all rectangles, but we don’t see them that way. In reality they’re very elusive forms. The way the view through the rungs of a chair changes when you move even the slightest bit – I want to capture some of that mystery in my work.”

About The Artist:

“I have worked to free shape from its ground, and then to work the shape so that it has a definite relationship to the space around it; so that it has a clarity and a measure within itself of its parts (angles, curves, edges and mass); and so that, with color and tonality, the shape finds its own space and always demands its freedom and separateness.” – Ellswoth Kelly

Ellsworth Kelly is an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker associated with Hard-edge painting, Color Field painting and the Minimalist school. His works demonstrate unassuming techniques emphasizing the simplicity of form.

Although Kelly can now be considered an essential innovator and contributor to the American abstraction art movement, he was not always seen in such a positive light. It was hard for many to find the connection between Kelly’s art and the dominant stylistic trends  For Example, observing how light fragmented on the surface of water, he painted Seine (1950), made of black and white rectangles arranged by chance.

He created a new freedom of painterly expression.  He began working in extremely large formats and explored the concepts of seriality and monochrome paintings.  As a painter he worked in an exclusively abstract mode. By the late 1950s his painting stressed shape and planar masses (often assuming non-rectilinear formats). His work of this period also provided a useful bridge from the vanguard American geometric abstraction of the 1930s and early 1940s to the Minimalism and reductive art of the mid-1960s and 1970s.

Kelly has distilled his palette and introduced forms never before.  He starts with a rectangular canvas that he carefully paints with many coats of white paint; a shaped canvas, usually painted in a single bright color, is placed on top.  The quality of line seen in his paintings and in the form of his shaped canvases is very subtle.  The use of form and shadow, as well as the construction and deconstruction of the visible implies perfection.

For more information and price please contact the gallery at info@gsfineart.com

WOW! – Work of the Week – Clandestine Culture “I Came Back” 10/05/15

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Clandestine Culture, I Came Back

Clandestine Culture
я вернулся, (I CAME BACK)
2014
Acrylic on Wood
81 x 48
Signed on verso

About This Work:

This work titled “I Came Back” or  “я вернулся” (in Russian), by Miami Street Artist CLANDESTINE CULTURE,could not be more relevant today then ever before.  “For those 25 years of age or younger, the Soviet Union symbol of the Hammer and Sickle, mean nothing.  There is an age group that has never seen that symbol, or even knew of a Soviet Union”  says the artist.

What this work represents is exactly what the artist wants that age group, 25 years or younger, to understand.  That message is that history repeats itself.  Painted in 2014, during Russia’s invasion into Crimea, and aggressive military intervention in Ukraine, this painting forewarns the world of what is to come.  Russian President Putin flexes his political muscles, and lets the world know that he, and Russia are coming back.  They are not the weakened Russia, that perhaps the world sees them as.

Fast forward to 2015, and we see President Putin is at it again, aligning himself with Syria, and positioning his stronghold in the Middle East.  Showing that Russia is still a “super power”, and standing up to America

Painted in the old Soviet Union colors of red and gold, this painting is rather simple, but very powerful in its message.  Depicting the iconic Hammer and Sickle, with star and olive branches as the main focal point, they symbol says it all. The words “I Came back” written in Russian lets us know, that this is a message about the present, and a warning about the future.  

This is exactly what street art intends to do.  Historically, street art has always contained a social, a political, and an environmental message.  The art challenges the viewer to react not only to the artwork, but to the substantive issues, and surroundings that is being discussed.  

Make no mistake, Street Art is not just pretty paintings on a wall.  That would be simply called a mural.  Street Art is much more important than that.  Street Art has substance, context, and a concept.  Whether it is Haring talking about AIDS, or Apartheid, Basquiat discussing issues of racism, drugs, and struggle of daily life, or Banksy’s witty paradoxical installations and wall drawings, Street Art has become a depiction and a reaction to the world most important issues, and struggles.  Its “in your face” style, is arguably the most reactionary art movement that the art world has yet to witness.

Never before has an art movement, been so literal, and purposeful.  Like his predecessors Haring and Basquiat, and his contemporaries Banksy and  Shepard Fairey, CLANDESTINE CULTURE focuses on the world’s issues around us, and challenges us to acknowledge, question, and react.

About The Artist:

The artist chooses to remain anonymous.  He hits the street with his face and head completely covered. He believes that the painting and the message is more important then the artist.  He uses everyday people, images and words, to show that in the end, we are all part of one world wide culture…A CLANDESTINE CULTURE

For more information and price please contact the gallery at info@gsfineart.co

WOW! – Work of the Week – Roy Lichtenstein “Shipboard Girl” 9/28/15

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Roy Lichtenstein, Shipboard Girl

Roy Lichtenstein
Shipboard Girl
1965
Offset lithograph
27 3/16  x 20 1/4 in.
Pencil signed
This work was not produced in a numbered edition.

About This Work:

Roy Lichtenstein, like many of his pop art contemporaries, was at first an abstract expressionist. Gradually, however, during the decade following his discharge from the army, he turned his attention increasingly to imagery drawn from such popular cultural sources as commercial advertising, romance and war comics, and cartooning in general.

Not only was Lichtenstein interested in the look of comic books, but also in the way they were produced. He carefully studied the way in which small dots of ink, known as Ben Day dots, were printed. He then enlarged these dots in his art to give his works the appearance of mechanically printed commercial products. Ben Day dots are the pattern of dots used in commercial printing to cheaply reproduce shading.

In the print Shipboard girl of 1965, we see Lichtenstein’s mature style in its rudimentary form. The image exemplifies all the qualities that his many paintings and prints of young women culled from romance comics exhibit — a girl, usually blonde, in extreme close-up, lips parted, her head tilted at an angle, with enormous, soft, liquid eyes, depicted at a moment of emotional climax.

Perhaps the woman in Shipboard girl is just enjoying the sun, or perhaps she is thinking of a shipboard romance that has soured.  The life bouy lounging in the background is a visual pun suggesting that she is longing for a boy to rescue her from the as-yet-unreached turbulent seas of love. This sly humor is characteristically Lichtenstein.

 What is salient about this work, however, is that here in its developmental stage, we have all the formal features which will come to characterize Lichtenstein’s subsequent output. Lichtenstein’s visual vocabulary, the characteristic elements of his style, are flat areas of unmodulated color, a schematized cartoon-like outline, the removal of anecdotal detail, and more importantly, the use of the Benday dots. Here we see him working towards a style which will become uniquely identifiable as his, and which ironically, over time and in its final formulation will replace the original in the very cartoon context from which it was derived.

About The Artist:

Roy Lichtenstein (October 27, 1923 – September 29, 1997) was a prominent American pop artist. His work defined the basic premise of pop art better than any other through parody.  Favoring the old-fashioned comic strip as subject matter, Lichtenstein produced hard-edged, precise compositions that documented while it parodied often in a tongue-in-cheek humorous manner.

In 1961, Lichtenstein began his first pop paintings using cartoon images and techniques derived from the appearance of commercial printing. This phase would continue to 1965, and included the use of advertising imagery suggesting consumerism and homemaking.  His first work to feature the large-scale use of hard-edged figures and Ben-Day dots was Look Mickey  in 1961.  This piece came from a challenge from one of his sons, who pointed to a Mickey Mouse comic book and said; “I bet you can’t paint as good as that, eh, Dad?”  

Lichtenstein had his first one-man show at the Castelli gallery in 1962; the entire collection was bought by influential collectors before the show even opened.  It was at this time, that Lichtenstein began to find fame not just in America, but worldwide.  His work featured thick outlines, bold colors and Ben-Day dots to represent certain colors, as if created by photographic reproduction.  However, rather than attempt to reproduce his subjects, his work tackled the way mass media portrays them.

In the 1970s and 1980s, his style began to loosen and he expanded on what he had done before.  His style was replaced with more surreal works.  His “mirror” paintings consist of sphere-shaped canvases with areas of color and dots.  Lichtenstein also created a series of still lifes (paintings that show inanimate objects) in different styles during the 1970s. In the 1980s and 1990s, Lichtenstein began to mix and match styles. Often his works relied on optical (relating to vision) tricks, drawing his viewers into a debate over the nature of “reality.”

Lichtenstein’s work is included in numerous museums, such as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Denver Art Museum, Denver; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Foundation Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 

For more information and price please contact the gallery at info@gsfineart.com

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