Modern Sculpture with Apertures

Roy LICHTENSTEIN
(1923 -1997)

Modern Sculpture with Apertures

Screenprint enamel on interlocking Plexiglas forms with mirrored silver Mylar, N. 36/200
16 ½ x 6 x 7 ½ inches
Signed and numbered
Executed: 1967

Catalogue raisonne: M.L. Corlett 24

Printer: Maurel Studios, New York

Publication : The artist, for Artists for Scholarship, Education and Defense Fund for Racial Equality, New York.

Roy Lichtenstein’s sculptural work is best thought of as drawings in space.

From the Gagosian 2023 exhibition catalogue Lichtenstein Remembered, an exhibition of sculptures and related studies:

“Though obviously sculptural in the common meaning of the term, heavy wrought objects freestanding in space,” writes Adam Gopnik in the exhibition’s catalogue, “these works are more optical than tactile—planar and pictorial, more than ‘haptic’ and three-dimensional, more like crystallized drawings than like full-bodied sculpture. They invite us to look through them, rather than to walk around them.” 

Daniel Belasco, in his catalogue essay, repeats Diane Waldman’s earlier assertion that Lichtenstein’s sculptures are three-dimensional projections of his paintings—a claim also endorsed by the artist himself—but counters it with the more radical argument that the artist in fact set out to “assassinate” sculpture by revealing its fundamental artificiality and dependence on art historical self-reference. Pointing out that sculpture differs from painting in that it has no need to replicate physical volume, Belasco describes how Lichtenstein’s sculptures modify, teasingly, the painter’s language of modeling and foreshortening.