Tate Modern will open a new exhibition on february 21st. It is a new retrospective on the work of Roy Lichtenstein. Considered as one of the fathers of Pop Culture, he was one of the biggest influencers of the 20th century.
Roy Lichtenstein was an American artist, born and deceased in Manhattan, New York – USA. During the 60’s, he developed a consequent artistic work inspired from the world of advertising and the american Comic books. The Tate is proud to present the most complete exhibition in the past 20 years. In partnership with the Art Institute of Chicago, the London visitors will be able to admire 125 most important paintings and sculptures from Roy Lichtenstein. The exhibition covers 30 years of rich artistic work in which the artist imposed pop culture in the artistic references of the 20th century. For the first time, people will be able to see works like “Look Mickey” 1961 or “Whaam!” and “Drowning Girl” both 1963.
His most famous image is arguably Whaam! (1963, Tate Modern, London), one of the earliest known examples of pop art, adapted a comic-book panel from a 1962 issue of DC Comics’ All-American Men of War. The painting depicts a fighter aircraft firing a rocket into an enemy plane, with a red-and-yellow explosion. The cartoon style is heightened by the use of the onomatopoeic lettering “Whaam!” and the boxed caption “I pressed the fire control… and ahead of me rockets blazed through the sky…” This diptych is large in scale, measuring 1.7 x 4.0 m (5 ft 7 in x 13 ft 4 in). Whaam is widely regarded as one of his finest and most notable works.
Of course, what makes Roy Lichtenstein work outstanding is definitely his painting technique. In most of his signature work, he used the Ben-day dots technique.
The Ben-Day dots printing process, named after illustrator and printer Benjamin Henry Day, Jr., is similar to Pointillism. Depending on the effect, color and optical illusion needed, small colored dots are closely spaced, widely spaced or overlapping.Magenta dots, for example, are widely spaced to create pink.
Pulp comic books of the 1950s and 1960s used Ben-Day dots in the four process colors (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) to inexpensively create shading and secondary colors such as green, purple, orange and flesh tones. Heres some of great artwork from Roy Lichtenstein.
His work as the entire Pop Art culture is still one of the biggest source of creativity today. Contemporary art, fashion, design or even architecture get their inspiration from people like Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg or Jasper Johns.
LICHTENSTEIN, A RETROSPECTIVE TATE MODERN OF LONDON 21
February – 27 May 2013 For more information: http://www.tate.org.uk
You can also visit Artsy website dedicated page about Roy Lichtenstein. They have an amazing information about him and many others: https://artsy.net/artist/roy-lichtenstein
Info sourced at Tate modern and Wikipedia websites. All content is copyrighted with no reproduction rights available.
