Arte e Cultura
Roy Lichtenstein Back in Amsterdam After Exactly 50 Years
(Photo: http://mma.prnewswire.com/media/592417/Moco_Museum_Roy_Lichtenstein.jpg )
You recognize his works at first glance: he has become part of the unconscious cultural heritage to all of us.
Roy Lichtenstein has a 'Lasting Influence', he was the first to put Mickey Mouse in a painting before Damien Hirst , Andy Warhol and numerous others did. The applications you have seen in the current daily fashion image is a direct translation of Roy Lichtenstein's work.
The exhibition at Moco is curated by the Italian Gianni Mercurio (curator of shows about Keith Haring , Jean Michel Basquiat , Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein ) and Mirta d'Argenzio (curator of a retrospective of Damien Hirst and Robert Rauschenberg ) with active participation of Kim and Lionel Logchies, founders of Moco Museum. The exhibition, organized by Moco on presents, through a large selection of editions like the famous Brushstrokes, Imperfects and Still lifes from European and American collections, the conspicuous themes treated by the great American artist.
Starting with images taken from advertisements by the newspaper and objects of everyday life, he discovered cartoons as both inspiration and source-material for his art. His preferred material was romance or war-inspired, which reinterpreted by Lichtenstein are supplied with irony.
Lichtenstein explained his choice of comic frames for his works in these words:
The Lichtenstein exhibition at Moco Museum will include a 3D interior room installation based on Lichtenstein's painting "Bedroom at Arles", which he made in 1992 after a postcard of Van Gogh's famous "The Artist's Room at Arles" (1888-89). A 3D installation of VAN GOGH 's painting was last presented at the Van Gogh museum in 2000.
Roy Lichtenstein said about his version of the Arles Room:
I've cleaned his room up a little bit for him, and he'll be very happy when he gets home from the hospital to see that l've straightened his shirts and bought some new furniture. Mine is a rather large painting and his is rather small. His is much better, but mine is much bigger. The exhibtion also displays photographs by
Gianfranco Gorgoni , Timothy Greenfield Sanders ,
Dennis Hopper and Ugo Mulas , portraying the artists from the Fifties til the Ninenties.
Lichtenstein's art seems apparently "easy" to understand. But beyond the surface it is an intellectual, rationalistic art, premeditated and realized through a complex process of deconstruction and reconstruction of the image: bold lines associated with flat colors, thousands of regular dots, a magnified halftone screen, that suggests the idea of and even the impression of reflections of light.
From the beginning Roy Lichtenstein's sophisticated art has had an uninterrupted power of seduction on visual culture and communication, whose end is still far off.
In 1965 Lichtenstein made the first Brushstrokes, paintings that as one isolated object reproduce one or more brush strokes:
Abstract gestures and brushstrokes had already been of interest to Lichtenstein in the '50s and were to be seen again in his work in the '80s, but with a new sense of freedom. The "frozen" brushstroke of the sixties melts away in a disorganized and subtle sign, with which he tackles inspired famous themes like by Vincent Van Gogh and the series by Willem de Kooning . Here we can appreciate the artist's attraction to self-referencing.
After the "heroic" age of pop, the Sixties, Lichtenstein looked at the genres and masters of the great art of the past, to reinterpret it through the filter of his poetry and his technique, from landscape, to still life, to pastiche and from Mondrian, to Picasso, to Matisse and Brancusi.
The exhibition also presents a selection of spectacular large size editions from the series "Imperfect Paintings", which testimonies an incursion of the artist into geometric abstraction: with his subtle irony the artist defines those works as a commentary on
https://we.tl/vs0r3z5W7i
New exhibition at Moco Museum Amsterdam
November 3, 2017 - May 31, 2018