Gagosian and Almine Rech Gallery are pleased to announce two concurrent and related exhibitions of works by Tom Wesselmann in London. Organized in partnership with The Estate of Tom Wesselmann, both exhibitions highlight the bold approach to scale and color, art history and erotic representation that make Wesselmann one of the most inventive Pop artists of his time.
Over the years, I’d gotten excited about scale. . . . I wanted to deal with these big shapes, so I came in closer and closer on the nude. . . . That was really when my work began.
—Tom Wesselmann
Wesselmann first gained critical acclaim in the early 1960s for his Great American Nude series. Many of these lounging female subjects, with pouted lips and tan lines, were painted in patriotic red, white, and blue, combining the prototypes of Western figure painting—from Titian to Matisse—with the high voltage of American advertising. After the Great American Nude paintings, Wesselmann shifted his focus, exploring more intimate, close-up views of the nude in the Bedroom Paintings.
At Gagosian, a selection of Bedroom Paintings made between 1968 and 1983 reveals the full breadth of the series that Wesselmann considered so central to his oeuvre. Fragments of the human body, such as a hand or a breast, are juxtaposed with objects common to the bedroom—a light switch, flowers, the edges of pillows and curtains. These large-scale compositions draw attention to the abstract properties of each depicted form, the interlocking positive and negative shapes evoking the technique of collage in areas of sharp delineation, bold color, and softly rendered detail. In Bedroom Painting #63 (1983), the bedroom is framed by a female nude—her arm, torso, and thigh forming a triangular window. Although she is not at the center of the image, her presence is unmistakable, determining the complex shape of the canvas.
