Roy Lichtenstein

Leo Castelli Gallery, New York
Private Collection, New York
Vivian Horan Fine Arts, New York
James Goodman Gallery, New York
Private Collection, Toronto
Christie's, New York, May 12, 2011, lot 146
Acquired by the present owner from the above sale

New York, Museum of Modern Art, Art Lending Service, Penthouse Exhibitions: Art in Editions, June - August 1965 (another example exhibited)
Cleveland Museum of Art, Works by Roy Lichtenstein, November - December 1966 (another example exhibited)
New York, Museum of Modern Art, Art Lending Service, Penthouse Exhibition: Members Collect Retrospective Exhibition, March - May 1967 (another example exhibited)
New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Kansas City, William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Atkins Museum of Fine Art; Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art; Seattle Art Museum; Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, Roy Lichtenstein, September 1969 - August 1970 (another example exhibited)
St. Louis, The Greenberg Gallery, Roy Lichtenstein, September - November 1973 (another example exhibited)
Mexico City, Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Salas Nacional y Diego Rivera; Monterrey, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey; Washington, D.C., The Corcoran Gallery of Art;  Roy Lichtenstein: Escultura, Pintura y Grafica, July - September 1999, p. 82 (another example exhibited)
Valencia, Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno; La Coruña, Fundación Pedro Barrié de la Maza; Lisbon, Centro Cultural de Belem, Roy Lichtenstein: Sculptures and Drawings, October 1999 - August 2000 (another example exhibited)
Washington, D.C., The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Roy Lichtenstein: Sculpture & Drawings, June - September 1999,  no. 15, p. 57 (another example exhibited)
Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Pop!, June - September 2005 (another example exhibited)

Elizabeth Sverbeyeff, "Life With Pop," New York Times Magazine, May 2 1965, Section 6, p. 5, pl. 1
Anon., "You Bought It, Now Live With It," Life, Vol. 59, July 16, 1965, p. 138-140, illustrated in color
Bruno Alfieri, "A Critic's Journal II," Metro, No. 10, 1966, pl. 1, p. 5, illustrated
Alberto Boatto and Giordano Falzoni, Lichtenstein, Rome, 1966, p. 79
John Coplans, Roy Lichtenstein, New York, 1972, pl. 47
Himilce Novas, "Dorothy Lichtenstein: La Vida Y El Arte De Una Mujer Liberada," Fascinación (Venezuela), Year 2, no. 1, 1975, pp. 34-35

 Roy Lichtenstein's sculptures are trademarked by their distinctly planar qualities, where the pictorial elements of his paintings are rendered as concrete, freestanding images drawn in space.  They appear as direct detachments from their original two-dimensional source compositions, and, although fabricated from painted, patinated metals, are not quite three-dimensional.  Rather than being shaped and formed in the round, the perception of volume is created instead by the graphic techniques of his paintings, presenting the viewer with a single viewpoint, as the artist plays with flatness and the illusion of depth and form. The characteristic heavy black lines and bold primary hues presented in Lichtenstein's Pop paintings outline the borders of the sculptures and appear as broad, diagonal hatch lines and Benday dots evoking a sense of volume, reflection or shadow.

In the same period that Lichtenstein was producing a series of painted ceramic heads of women, the Explosion sculptures of the mid 1960s appeared and were derived from scenes of military combat from war comics of the period. These are among the very first sculptural series that exemplify both the formal elements and Pop ideology representative of Lichtenstein's sculptures which remained consistent throughout his artistic career.  Small Explosion (Desk Explosion), 1965, is composed of multiple flat, primary colored layers of steel repeating outward and suspending a momentary blast in action. He manages to capture both the violence of the eruption with the sharp, star-shaped planes and the subsequent smoke that follows an explosion with the use of the perforated, cloud-like form layered between.   Alone, it stands as a formally designed sculptural abstraction, yet indisputably connected to its Pop origin.