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

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

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

The work will be carefully handled and packaged in a reinforced cardboard carton. The shipment will be sent with a tracking number.

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 of American pop, and as such he drew inspiration for his work from popular art: advertising, magazines, comics…; as well as from the history of traditional art: Art Deco, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism (in which he belonged at the beginning of his career)…
Lichtenstein’s work is characterized by irony (this is something pop artists boasted about, sometimes disguised as snobbery or superficiality…), the use of Ben-Day dots (used in graphic arts) and industrial colors, the language of the comic (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 to use figuration. Moreover, the more popular and mechanical a figuration, the better.
Of course there was nothing more popular and mechanical than a comic in 1958, so Lichtenstein decided he would create commercially produced images.
That said… what appears to be machine-made is done by hand.
Those 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.
Born in New York, Lichtenstein lived in this city, the capital of everything that represents pop, and he would die there at 73, celebrated as an artist who sold paintings for more than 40 million euros.