Roy Lichtenstein Landscape 7 (from Ten Landscapes) 1967

Landscape 7 (from Ten Landscapes) 1967

Artist: Roy Lichtenstein
Title: Landscape 7 (from Ten Landscapes)
Year: 1967
Medium: Screenprint on white rag board with collaged iridescent silver Mylar
Dimensions: 27.3 × 46.3 cm
Edition: 100 — signed, dated and numbered verso
Signature: Signed, dated and numbered on the reverse
Authentication: Printed adhesive label “LANDSCAPE 7 / Original Editions” on reverse
Printer: Fine Creations, Inc., New York
Publisher: Original Editions and Leo Castelli Gallery, New York
Reference: Corlett 57
Frame: Framed (as shown)
Type: Limited edition screenprint with Mylar collage — from the Ten Landscapes portfolio

Description : 

Landscape 7 (1967) is one of the most technically distinctive and visually extraordinary works in Roy Lichtenstein’s print catalogue — a screenprint from the celebrated Ten Landscapes portfolio that deploys a material innovation unique in his graphic work: a collaged element of iridescent silver Mylar, physically adhered to the surface of the print, whose holographic shimmer shifts with the viewer’s angle of vision and the quality of the ambient light.

The composition is formally elemental — a semi-circular arch, the Ben-Day dot ground in the lower register, a flat mustard-yellow field above — but the iridescent Mylar arc transforms the image with every movement of the viewer or the light. The rainbow diffractions that play across its surface connect Lichtenstein’s graphic language unexpectedly to Op Art and to the phenomenological concerns of his contemporaries, while remaining entirely within his own visual system: the dot, the flat colour, the clean horizon, now joined by a material that the commercial printing industry was just beginning to deploy in the late 1960s.

The Ten Landscapes portfolio is among Lichtenstein’s most inventive graphic productions — a series in which he systematically explores different chromatic and material approaches to the landscape format, each print a distinct proposition about how commercial and industrial materials can constitute fine art. Landscape 7 is the most dramatic demonstration of this proposition: the Mylar is not a decoration but the subject, its shifting iridescence the equivalent of Monet’s changing light rendered in the materials of packaging and commercial display.

Published by Original Editions and Leo Castelli Gallery, New York — the gallery that represented Lichtenstein and that was the central institution of American Pop Art — and printed by Fine Creations, Inc., New York. Referenced as Corlett 57 in the authoritative catalogue raisonné. Signed, dated, and numbered verso from an edition of 100. Presented framed.