Dimensions: image: 1287 x 1650 mm
Copyright: © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein/DACS 2014 | CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED, Photo: Tate
Curator: Roy Lichtenstein’s "Reflections on Brushstrokes," part of the Tate Collections, strikes me as a playful yet critical commentary on Abstract Expressionism. Editor: It's immediately striking—almost aggressively cheerful, considering it's dissecting such loaded symbols of artistic expression. Curator: Precisely. Lichtenstein employs his signature Ben-Day dots and bold colors to deconstruct the spontaneous gesture, turning it into a calculated graphic. Editor: The brushstrokes, usually icons of emotional outpouring, are rendered flat, almost cartoonish. Are we meant to see them as hollow, or as newly powerful symbols? Curator: Perhaps both. He captures the irony of iconic gestures becoming clichés. Yet, by re-presenting them, Lichtenstein elevates them to a new plane of significance. Editor: So, he’s not dismissing expressionism, but reflecting on how its visual vocabulary has permeated our culture, shifting its meaning. It’s a compelling idea.
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http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/lichtenstein-reflections-on-brushstrokes-p12128
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This is one of a group of seven prints on the theme of reflections. Lichtenstein regularly paraphrases pre-existing images in his art, often reusing aspects of his own works, and Reflections on Brushstrokes refers back to his 1960s Brushstroke paintings. One such close-up of a schematised brushstroke forms the base image of the present print. It is partly obscured by semi-abstract blocks of colour and pattern, both printed and collaged to the surface of the print, to simulate reflected light, as if the image were behind glass or reflected in another surface. Gallery label, June 2008
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