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

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

- Sheet dimensions: 28 x 36 cm
- Artwork 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 reinforced cardboard. The shipment will be tracked with a tracking number.

The shipment will also include transportation 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 mined 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 popular art: commercial advertisements, magazines, comics...; as well as from the history of traditional art: Art Deco, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism (which he aligned with at the start of his career)…
Lichtenstein’s work is characterized by irony (something pop artists boasted about, sometimes masked as snobbery or superficiality…), the use of Benday dots (used in graphic arts) and industrial colors, the language of comics (onomatopoeia, panels, narration) and command of line.
Lichtenstein began in vogue Abstract Expressionism, but soon joined the rest of the pop guerrilla to rebel against abstraction and use figuration. Moreover, the more popular and mechanical the figurative, the better.
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 have been done by a machine is reproduced 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, 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.