Paperzine - News

Mercurio Gianni (eds.)
Roy Lichtenstein
Editore Skira, Milano

To accompany the monographic exhibition dedicated to Roy Lichtenstein previously shown in the Milan Triennale and now on view in the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Skira Editore has published a rich catalogue of more than four hundred full-colour pages, featuring all the works chosen for the exhibition, primarily large-scale canvases, as well as preparatory drawings, sketches, photographs and collages made by Lichtenstein in the period from the fifties to the nineties of the last century.
In that period, the American artist devoted his attentions to rediscovering and reinterpreting artistic movements of the past, taking a special interest in Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism, thirties Modernism, minimalist abstraction, Action Painting and the historical avant-gardes in general.
The paintings and drawings reproduced in this volume represent works by such artists and maestros of contemporary art as Picasso, Matisse, Monet, Cézanne, Léger, Marc, Mondrian, Dalí and Carrà, which Lichtenstein re-elaborated in a Pop vein. This moment of Lichtenstein’s artistic research drew its inspiration from the publications that focused on disseminating art, where the exceptional dimension of large-scale painting is reduced to a printed and commercialised object: a process of photographic reproduction of art, reducing it to the status of a commercial product, that reiterates the form of the drawing and the painting found in the great American Pop maestro’s works.
What made it possible to design the exhibition and the catalogue was the loan of works and repertoire materials from international public and private collections, including the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, the Ludwig Forum in Aachen, the Louisiana Museum of Copenhagen, the Whitney Museum and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Museum of Modern Art of Vienna and the Broad Art Foundation of Los Angeles.
The volume starts with an introduction by the curator, Gianni Mercurio, after which the images of the works are accompanied by critical essays by Demetrio Paparoni, Robert Pincus-Witten, Annabelle Ténèze and Frederic Tuten.

www.skira.net