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Category :Art Exhibits |
Written by: Elena Lanzanova
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Roy Lichtenstein, Master Of Contemporary Art, At The Triennale
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Monday 1 February 2010
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After the success of the colossal exhibitions dedicated to Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, the curator Gianni Mercurio, expert and passionate about American art of the Second Post-War period, signed “Roy Lichtenstein, Meditations on Art”, in course at the Triennale museum in Milan until 30th May (in July, it will be transferred to the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, where it will be open to the public until 3rd October).
An extraordinary exhibition which intends to explore in a new, and for this reason intriguing way Lichtenstein’s work, investigating its acute and courageous pictorial operation. This is done through about one hundred works, mainly of large dimensions, enriched with a repertoire of drawings, collages and sculptures which come from public and private collections, among which the Ludwig Museum of Cologne, the Ludwig Forum of Aachem, the Lousiana Museum of Copenhagen, the Whitney Museum and the Guggenheim Museum of New York, the Museum Moderner Kunst of Vienna and the Broad Art Foundation of Los Angeles.
Roy Lichtenstein joined his skilful creativity to an intuition: the one to isolate images taken from comics or publicity illustrations and reproduce them enlarged with painting which evokes the effect of typographic printing. However, what the American artist did was not simply copying, but rather a meditation on the massified phenomenon, typical of the era of uncontrolled consumerism, of the reproducibility of works of art. As Gianni Mercurio states: “Lichtenstein does not cite the originals but his own versions of those images. In substance, the author cites himself, giving life to a process never seen before that moment: “the citationism of appropriationism”. Therefore, the exhibition follows the red thread of the author’s citation, of the meditation on the masters of the past, on the iconographic revisitation of languages, styles and movements. Always in the perspective of a personalisation of the operation.
The exhibition “Roy Lichtenstein, Meditations on Art” has been divided into thematic sections which include works realised from the Fifties to the Nineties and inspired to the Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism, Modernism of the Thirties, to minimalist Abstractionism, to Action painting and the genres of landscapes and still lives.
The anthological exhibition starts with the works from the Fifties which, as Mercurio explains, “are not very well known and many of them are displayed for the first time”, and in which the author revisited medieval iconographies and reinterpreted paintings by American artists such as William Ranney and works such as Washington Crossing The Delaware by Emanuel Gottlieb Leuze, tracing the expressive stylistic elements of European abstractionism and the universes of Paul Klee and Picasso.
“In this phase of his production – the curator says – the artist blended European modernism with the vernaculars of American history and culture: the Indians and the Far West, life scenes of pioneers who conquered lands, heroes and cow-boys”.
On the other hand, in the Sixties Lichtenstein re-elaborated works by the great artists who marked the history of art. The “popified” Laocoonte in technicolour version, Sole che nasce (Rising Sun) by Pellizza da Volpedo which becomes a comic, like the series of Cathedrals of Rouen by Monet, La musa dormiente (the Sleeping Muse) by Brancusi, or Cavaliere rosso (Red Knight) by Boccioni, all extraordinary masterpieces transformed by using a typically typographic style. And then, the Still Lives with guitar or the Lying Nude by Picasso, where cubist language turns into Pop Art aesthetics. A comic-strip frenzy which does not even spare Cèzanne’s fruit, Léger’s machines, the surrealist delusions of Dalì, Mondrian’s geometries, the metaphysical objects of Carrà, the abstract expressionism of De Kooning.
It is the fascinating work of a post-modern art which “copies” the masters from the past: a performance of skilfully “falsified” art, feature which contradistinguished the singular talent of Roy Lichtenstein, the great master of contemporary art who contributed to the birth of Pop Art in New York, and is today considered one of the most original and significant protagonists of late twentieth-century American painting.
From 26th January to 30th May 2010
ROY LICHTENSTEIN – MEDITATIONS ON ART
At the Triennale Design Museum
Viale Alemagna, 6 – 20121 Milan
Web: www.triennale.it
Email: info@triennale.it
Opening times: Every day from 10.30 am to 8.30 pm
Thursday from 10.30 am to 11.00 pm
Closed on Monday
Entrance: Full 9 euros; Reduced 5,50 euros.
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