Roy Lichtenstein - Kiss V - offset lithography - licensed print 2004

Offset lithography by Roy Lichtenstein (*)
Reproduction of the work “Kiss V,” work created by Roy Lichtenstein in 1964.
Luxurious edition on bright white (stated) graphic paper (250 g/m²)
Authorized printing by the Estate of Roy Lichtenstein.

- Sheet dimensions: 28 x 36 cm
- Motif dimensions: 20 x 20 cm
- Year: 2004
- Condition: Excellent (this work has never been framed or exhibited, always kept in a professional art folder, and is offered in perfect condition).
- Provenance: Private collection.

The work will be carefully handled and packaged in a reinforced cardboard box. The shipment will be insured and tracked.

The shipment will also include transport insurance for the final value of the artwork with a full refund in case of loss or damage, at no cost to the buyer.

(*) The painter and sculptor who mined the comic to turn it into museum material.
Roy Lichtenstein was one of the key figures in American pop art and, as such, drew inspiration for his work from both popular art: advertisements, magazines, comics…; and from the history of traditional art: Art Deco, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism (in which he was involved early in his career)…
Lichtenstein’s work is characterized by irony (something pop artists flaunted, sometimes dressed up as snobbery or superficiality…), the use of Benday dots (used in graphic arts) and industrial colors, the language of comics (onomatopoeia, panels, narrative) and the mastery of line.
Lichtenstein began in the fashionable Abstract Expressionism, but soon joined the rest of the pop guerrilla to rebel against abstraction and use figuration. Moreover, a figuration as popular and mechanical as possible.
Certainly in 1958 there was nothing more popular and mechanical than a comic, so Lichtenstein decided he would create mass-produced commercial images.
That said… what is reproduced is done by hand, even though it seems a machine did it.
Those images were faithful portraits of consumer society and mass culture, which can be either a critique of the contemporary world, an idealization, or a satire of Western capitalist society.
That ambiguity between critique and admiration, between mockery and respect, is typical of pop art, which cynically plays with a masquerade.
Born in New York, Lichtenstein lived in this city, the capital of everything that pop represents, and he would die there at 73, celebrated as an artist who sold paintings for more than 40 million euros.