Lichtenstein Expressionism

I’m not sure exactly why I do this, but I think that it’s to establish the hardest kind of archetype that I can.
—Roy Lichtenstein

Gagosian Paris is pleased to present Lichtenstein Expressionism.

Lichtenstein’s early appropriation of the aesthetics of American popular culture made him integral to the development of Pop art. Studying the work of Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Paul Klee, he incorporated elements of contemporary art theory and popular print media into his painting. In 1961 he began to replicate the Benday dot system used in comics, newspapers, and billboards; this would become a signature element of his work. By mimicking this industrial method and appropriating images from high and low culture, Lichtenstein realized a broad accessibility that had not yet been achieved in contemporary art. Some of his most recognizable series evolved from pop-cultural imagery: advertisements, war comics, and pinups, as well as traditional genres such as landscape and still-life painting. Turning his attention to art history, he began exploring classical architectural motifs. Beginning in the late 1960s, defining elements of Futurism—followed by Cubism, Surrealism, and Expressionism—featured regularly in his work.

Among the styles and movements appropriated by Lichtenstein, his borrowing of Expressionist motifs—from Alexei Jawlensky’s close-up, pensive faces to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s jagged, feline figures—strikes the clearest irony. Including key paintings, sculpture, drawings, and woodcuts, this exhibition demonstrates the bold paradox that Lichtenstein posed by translating Expressionist subjects into the primary colors and Pop flatness of his signature style. Sometimes he traded the Benday dots for striping, shading, and grisaille patterns in paintings that evoke Expressionist woodcuts, going as far as to create his own woodcuts incorporating Expressionist tropes. This exploration was realized in three dimensions with the impossibly tilted painted bronze caricature Expressionist Head (1980).