Roy Lichtenstein - Kiss V - offset lithography - licensed print 2004 ** NO RESERVE **

Offset lithography by Roy Lichtenstein (*)
Reproduction of the work “Kiss V”, created by Roy Lichtenstein in 1964.
Luxury edition on glossy art paper (250 g/m²)
Print authorised 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 therefore offered in perfect condition).
- Provenance: Private collection.

The work will be carefully handled and packed in reinforced cardboard packaging. Shipping 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 extracted from the comic to turn it into museum material. Roy Lichtenstein was one of the key figures of North American pop, and as such 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 (which he was involved in at the beginning of his career)… Lichtenstein’s work is characterized by its irony (something pop artists brag about, sometimes masked 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 use figuration. Moreover, a figuration that is more popular and mechanical is 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 be done by a machine 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 masking.
A New Yorker by birth, Lichtenstein lived in this city, capital of everything that pop represents, and in it he died at 73, celebrated as an artist who sold paintings for more than 40 million euros.