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Dec 16, 2023

Beyond the canvas: celebrating Lichtenstein’s lesser

A new exhibition aims to shine a light on the pop artist’s sculptural work, showing another side to his genius With their bold, primary colors, in-your-face composition and comic book aesthetic, Roy

A new exhibition aims to shine a light on the pop artist’s sculptural work, showing another side to his genius

With their bold, primary colors, in-your-face composition and comic book aesthetic, Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings are instantly recognizable. An icon of pop art, his work fused the high with the low, creating art that was energetic, broadly appealing and very, very fun.

Compared with the paintings, Lichtenstein’s sculptures have received relatively less attention, a fact that Gagosian capitalizes on with its show Lichtenstein Remembered, curated by Irving Blum, celebrating the artist’s centenary with a show all about his otherly, two-dimensional sculptures. The show is a tightly curated, beguiling look at a different side of a well-known titan of 20th-century art.

“Sculpture has been a very important part of Lichtenstein’s career,” said Gagosian director Stefan Ratibor, “whether it’s the early explosions of the 60s, or the work throughout the 70s and 80s and 90s, which was more of those almost like line sculptures. He created things that were very sculptural, even though they were almost just lines of steel, whether it was of a coffee cup, or of a person, or of a surrealist figure.”

Ratibor shared that the intent of Lichtenstein Remembered was to “single out an element of Roy’s work that has been with him throughout his career, but hasn’t been focused on as much”. Ratibor went on to say: “It’s what we do [at Gagosian], we try to shine a light at a different angle of an artist and present different aspects to learn more about their genius,” and that Lichtenstein’s sculptures were a “very important part of his career”.

Lichtenstein Remembered is an outgrowth of a wealth of experience and expertise that Gagosian has with Lichtenstein’s art, as well as a long-term relationship with his widow, Dorothy Lichtenstein. The gallery has done around 15 shows with Lichtenstein altogether, the first dating to 1998, a look at the artist’s nudes at Gagosian’s Beverly Hills location. Subsequent shows explored Lichtenstein’s seminal paintings of women, the artist’s still lifes, Chinese-inspired landscapes, and an enormous recreation of a mural that Lichtenstein painted in 1983 at Castelli Gallery at 142 Greene Street. “Larry [Gagosian] is always keen to do things that no one else is prepared to do,” said Ratibor.

“With many of the artists that we work with, their output is so enormous that you can’t make a show that contains it all,” said Ratibor. “It’s our privilege as a gallery that we don’t have to do the big retrospective, we can do something on, for instance, Lichtenstein’s Chinese landscapes, or his nudes, so that we can really try to go in-depth into that aspect of the work.”

Lichtenstein himself declared that “a sculpture from any viewpoint should work the way a drawing works, which is a two-dimensional thing”, and the pieces at Gagosian’s exhibition tightly hold to this aesthetic, so much so that they’ve earned the description “drawings in space”. They look a little like a painting come to life, a little like an optical illusion – they are definitely unlike most sculptures audiences may have seen elsewhere. Writing in the show’s catalog, art critic Adam Gopnik accurately described them as “more optical than tactile – planar and pictorial more than ‘haptic’ and three-dimensional, more like crystallized drawings than like full-bodied sculpture”.

“Lichtenstein’s great genius is to create something very flat that is actually very textured,” said Ratibor. “He’s able to make things sculptural that are almost flat. The radicalness of this work is so rewarding, and it still appeals to so many visitors and artists.” In fact, it has been a significant influence on artist David Hockney, who declared in the show’s catalogue, “for me it’s the sculptures that are the most original and interesting … I’m sure his legacy as a sculptor will be secure.”

Looking at these pieces situated within the galley, they come off as almost hyperreal, their perspective lines not syncing up with the rest of the space in a coherent way. As art historian and curator Daniel Belasco puts it, the sculptures’ “pleasures stem from their absolute estrangement from the world of the real”.

Part of this bizarreness are the basic, chunky shapes that Lichtenstein uses to make these pieces, as though they are a cartoon come to life. Another part is that these works tend to be composed of jutting, angular lines and screaming yellows, blues and reds. There is a playful, almost children’s-toy feeling to these pieces, even as they work wonderfully to capture complex matter, like steam. “It’s such a brilliant way how he captures the essence of steam, which is so intangible, in bronze,” said Ratibor.

The ingeniousness with which these works are conceived go a good way toward explaining why Lichtenstein was of such great significance to his peers and why he still has such an influence on working artists. Ratibor noted that artist Alex Da Corte is paying homage to Lichtenstein by co-curating a major retrospective of the artist for the Whitney, due in 2026. Speaking to Lichtenstein’s importance, the former curator at the National Gallery of Art, Ruth Fine, wrote: “I think Roy’s personalized forms of figuration have given younger artists permission to invent their own responses to the visible world … the diversity of his art within an evolving, but defined set of boundaries, is a model for artists.”

Lichtenstein Remembered promises an appropriate tribute to the great artist on the anniversary of his 100th birthday. Kinetic works that create a startling freshness, the sculptures absolutely stand out, and are unmistakably Lichtenstein. The overall effect of seeing this show is of a body of work that, in spite of being highly unified, is nonetheless able to deliver one gut-punching surprise after another. As Ratibor puts it, “he’s one of those geniuses of art history that changed the way we look at ourselves”.

Lichtenstein Remembered is on show at the Gagosian in New York from 9 September to 21 October