Roy Lichtenstein
One of the greatest Pop artists that ever lived and whose name is synonmus with the Pop art movement, along with that of Andy Warhol. His work can be found all around the world in major galleries and museums along with his monumental sculptures that continue to decorate public venues worldwide.
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Roy Lichtenstein
Title: Haystack
Medium: Screenprint
Size: 48 x 66 cm
Edition Size: 250
Year: 1969
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Title: Crak!
Medium: Offset Lithograph
Size: 48.9 x 70.2 cm
Edition Size: 300
Year: 1964
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Title: Composition IV
Medium: Screenprint
Size: 56 x 69 cm
Edition Size: 120
Year: 1995
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Title: Sweet Dreams Baby
Medium: Screenprint
Size: 95 x 64 cm
Edition Size: 200
Year: 1965 | |
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Title: Venetian School II
Medium: Screenprint
Size: 120 x 86 cm
Edition Size: 60
Year: 1984
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Title: Two Paintings - Dagwood
Medium: Woodcut and Lithograph
Size: 136 x 98 cm
Edition Size: 60
Year: 1984 | |
Biography:
Roy Lichtenstein was born October 27, 1923, in New York City and grew up under no specific artistic influence neither at home nor at school. But at the age of 14 he attended a painting class at Parson's School of Design every Saturday morning.
In 1939, he studied under Reginald Marsh at the Art Students League in New York, and the following year under Hoyt L. Sherman at the School of Fine Arts at Ohio State University, Columbus. He served in the army from 1943 to 1946 and afterwards studied at the Ohio State University from 1946 and received his M.A. in 1949.
Like Andy Warhol he worked in the commercial graphic business for a while and in 1951, the Carlebach Gallery, New York, organized a solo exhibition of his semi-abstract paintings of the old West. Shortly thereafter, the artist moved to Cleveland, where he continued painting while working as an engineering draftsman to support his growing family.
Lichtenstein's first experiments with popular images go back to 1956, when he created the famous Ten Dollar Bill print, followed by a three year period of abstract painting. The drastic change in Lichtenstein's career came with his first painting in the style of a comic strip, it was a painting of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.
From 1957 to 1960, Lichtenstein obtained a teaching position at the State University of New York, Oswego and had by then, begun to include loosely drawn cartoon characters in his increasingly abstract canvases. From 1960 to 1963, he lived in New Jersey while teaching at Douglas's College, a division of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, he began to make paintings consisting exclusively of comic-strip figures, and introduced his Benday-dot grounds, lettering, and balloons. During this time he also started cropping images from advertisements.
Although he painstakingly prepared and executed his works he wanted them to look machine made. One of his peculiarities was, that he did not want his brush strokes to be seen.
From 1962, the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, held regular exhibitions of the artist’s work From 1964 and into the next decade, he successively depicted stylized landscapes, consumer-product packaging, adaptations of paintings by famous artists, geometric elements from Art Deco design (in the Modern series), parodies of the Abstract Expressionists’ style (in the Brushstrokes series), and explosions.
They all underlined the contradictions of representing three dimensions on a flat surface. Lichtenstein participated in the Venice Biennale in 1966, and was honoured with solo exhibitions in 1967 and 1968 at the Pasadena Art Museum and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, respectively.
In the early 1970's, he further explored this question with his abstract "Mirrors and Entablatures" series. Beginning in 1974 and up to the 1980's, he probed another long-standing issue: the concept of artistic style. All his series of works played with the characteristics of well-known 20th-century art movements. Lichtenstein continued to question the role of style in consumer culture in his 1990s series of "Interiors" which included images of his own works as decorative elements.
Lichtenstein was the subject of a major retrospective at the Guggenheim in 1994, three years before his death September 30, 1997. One of the last examples of Lichtenstein's public sculptural work can be found in Singapore at the Roy Lichtenstein Plaza, Millenia Walk. | 
Roy Lichtenstein
