ROY LICHTENSTEIN: THE POPULAR IMAGE

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Mitchell-Innes & Nash presents an exhibition of works by Roy Lichtenstein focusing on the artist’s exploration of popular imagery and mass production. This will be the gallery’s sixth solo exhibition of Lichtenstein’s work and will include 60 works ranging in media from the early 1950s until 1997, the last year of the artist’s life. Roy Lichtenstein is one of the founding members of the ‘Pop Art’ movement. Lichtenstein is best known for his boldly colored paintings of scenes culled from comic books and strips, however art historical references have always occupied a profound niche within his artistic practice. Many of these influences, ranging from Monet’s flickering brushwork to the abstraction of Expressionist mark making, often graphically manifest in the artist’s drawings and prints. For Lichtenstein, prints and multiples offered a way to bridge the boundary between high art and popular culture. The allure of popular imagery for Lichtenstein grew from the desire to blur the boundaries between “high” and “low” culture as a means of fusing art with daily life. Works like Ten Dollar Bill, a lithograph from 1956, illustrates Lichtenstein’s early investigation into the use of everyday symbols as subject matter. While this impulse is characteristic of Lichtenstein’s fully developed paintings, editions such as Ten Dollar Bill were his first to elevate such quotidian forms of commercial culture to the status of fine art. Roy Lichtenstein: The Popular Image traces the development of the artist’s interest in adopting both contemporary culture and art history as well as their artistic adaptation. The development of this practice becomes apparent in the transition between his early woodblocks such as The United States and the Macedonian (1953) to the precise, minimalist lithographs of his late career such as Venetian School I (1996). For Lichtenstein, the production of accessibility found merit in the dissolution of boundaries..IMAGE: Roy Lichtenstein, “Foot Medication Poster”, 1963. Offset lithograph on white wove paper. Sheet: 22 15/16 x 16 15/16 in. 58.3 x 43 cm. © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein