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

Roy Lichtenstein Offset Lithography (*)
Reproduction of the work “Kiss V,” created by Roy Lichtenstein in 1964.
Luxury edition on glossy graphic paper (250 g/m²)
Print authorized by the Estate of Roy Lichtenstein.

- Sheet dimensions: 28 x 36 cm
- Subject 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 packed in a reinforced cardboard package. Shipping will be tracked and certified.

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

(*) The painter and sculptor who plundered the comic to turn it into museum material.
Roy Lichtenstein was one of the key figures of American pop, 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 (which he supported early in his career)…
Lichtenstein’s work is characterized by irony (which pop artists boasted of, sometimes masked as snobbery or superficiality…), the use of Ben-day dots (used in graphic arts) and industrial colors, the language of comics (onomatopoeia, panels, narration) and mastery of line.
Lichtenstein began in the fashionable Abstract Expressionism, but soon joined the rest of the pop guerrilla to rebel against the abstract and employ figurative imagery. Moreover, the more popular and mechanical the figuration, the better.
Certainly in 1958 nothing was more popular and mechanical than a comic, so Lichtenstein decided he would create mass-produced commercial images.
That said… what seems to have been done by a machine is reproduced by hand.
These images were faithful portraits of consumer society and mass culture, which may or may not be 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 at a masquerade.
A New Yorker by birth, Lichtenstein lived in this city, the capital of everything that Pop represents, and in it he would die at 73, celebrated as an artist who sold paintings for more than 40 million euros.