羅伊·李奇登斯坦

Leo Castelli Gallery, New York (LC# 911)

Private Collection, New York

Sotheby's, New York, Contemporary Art Day Sale, 15 November 2007, Lot 200

Gagosian Gallery, New York

Sotheby’s, New York, Contemporary Art Evening Auction, 13 November 2012, Lot 51 (consigned from the above to benefit the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York)

Private Collection (acquired from the above sale)

Private Collection, Asia

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2013

Paris, Galerie Daniel Templon, Roy Lichtenstein: Brushstrokes, 1983, (edition no. unknown)

New York, Leo Castelli Gallery, Sculpture: John Chamberlain, Sandro Chia, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Julian Schnabel, Richard Serra, Lawrence Weiner, 1983, (edition no. unknown)

Ontario, Gallery Stratford; Ontario, College Park; Quebec, Musée du Quebec; Halifax, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia; Windsor, Art Gallery of Windsor; Edmonton, The Edmonton Art Gallery; Vancouver, Vancouver Art Gallery; Calgary, Glenbow Museum; and Montreal, Musée d'Art Contemporain, American Accents, 1983, n.p., illustrated in colour, (edition no. unknown)

New York, 65 Thompson Street, Roy Lichtenstein: Bronze Sculpture 1976-1989, 1989, p. 65, no. 23, illustrated in colour, (edition no. unknown)

Mexico City, Museo Del Palacio De Bellas Artes; Monterrey, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey; Washington D.C., Corcoran Gallery of Art; Valencia, Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno; A Coruña, Fundación Pedro Barrié de la Maza; and Lisbon, Centro Cultural de Belém, Roy Lichtenstein: Imágenes Reconocibles: Escultura, Pintura y Grafica, 1998, pp. 48 and 149, illustrated in colour, (1/6 exhibited)

Colour: The colour in the printed catalogue is fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Extremely close inspection reveals a few superficial, pinhead sized scratches to the base near the artist's signature. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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As much a deliberate nod to the grand legacy of Abstract Expressionism as it is a manifestation of the very ethos of Pop art, Roy Lichtenstein’s painted bronze Brushstroke Sculpture of 1982 is a work whose significance is determined by a central paradox. Existing somewhere on the spectrum between painting and sculpture – strategically placed by its creator in deliberate limbo in the midst of these two historically opposed genres – Brushstroke Sculpture makes manifest the characteristic indifference to medium-specificity that dominated much of Lichtenstein’s prodigious and categorically groundbreaking career. Though his legacy is most often evaluated for its contributions to the graphic arts, sculpture occupied a central position in Lichtenstein’s oeuvre from the first time he cast one of his iconic blonde heroines in glazed ceramic in 1965 until his death in 1997. Indeed, the artist’s inclination toward boundary-blurring is nowhere more successful or more apparent than in his sculpted works, whose origins are inseparable from his paintings: here the two disciplines flow freely into and out of one another. In consideration of Lichtenstein’s sculptures, Hal Foster argues: “These pieces exist between painting and sculpture in terms not only of genre but also of structure; where Minimalist objects are neither painting nor sculpture… Pop objects tend to be both-and. If most representational painting is a two-dimensional encoding of three dimensional objects, Lichtenstein reverses the process here, and freezes it somewhere in between” (Hal Foster, 'Pop Pygmalion, in: Exh. Cat., London, Gagosian Gallery, (and travelling), Roy Lichtenstein Sculpture, 2005, p. 10). Brushstroke Sculpture, its inherently two-dimensional source image rendered fascinatingly complex by its three-dimensional casting, is perhaps the most perfect exemplar of Foster’s apt analysis.

Lichtenstein first explored the theme of the brushstroke in a series of paintings and drawings begun in 1965 and extending into 1967. These canvases seize on the most overt feature of Abstract Expressionism – its hyperbolic painterliness and the heroic, emotive strokes that dominated its canvases – encapsulating within a single image the perceived essence of that hallowed art historical era. As much as these 1960s paintings broadcast a celebration or elevation of the primacy of the artist’s stroke, however, they also fully demystify and popularise Abstract Expressionism’s famously enigmatic reputation. Fifteen years later, in 1982, Lichtenstein took this playful view of the most inherently painterly of images, the symbolic distillation of the very act of painting, one step further, casting it in bronze to create Brushstroke Sculpture. Lifting his depicted brushstroke from the canvas, Lichtenstein situates it solidly, gravity-bound, in space. Suddenly, upstanding and building upon each other’s contours to achieve a quasi-figurative verticality, the artist’s primary yellow, blue, red, and white strokes are liberated from the confines of the canvas and redefined as something altogether new. As Frederic Tuten contends, “In Lichtenstein’s removing the brushstroke image so far from its original source, from a source already vitiated by convention and cliché by the time he turned to it, Lichtenstein actually reinvigorates, reforms the brushstroke cliché and converts it into an icon set apart from its historical context, giving it an existence entirely its own. It is the marvelous fluidity of these forms, these flashes of color, airy and fixed and poised in precarious balance, that captivates us” (Frederic Tuten in: Exh. Cat., New York, 65 Thompson Street, Roy Lichtenstein: Bronze Sculptures 1976-1989, 1989, pp. 12-13).