Roy Lichtenstein – Rain Forest

Rain Forest, 1992
From the portfolio Columbus: In Search of a New Tomorrow

• Artist: Roy Lichtenstein (American, 1923–1997)
• Medium: Screenprint
• Dimensions: 76 × 58 cm
• Edition: Edition of 100
• Signature: Signed
• Publisher: Edition Domberger, Filderstadt 

Rain Forest is a screenprint executed in 1992 by Roy Lichtenstein — one of the defining figures of American Pop Art and one of the most celebrated and widely collected artists of the twentieth century — signed by the artist, from the edition of 100, published by Edition Domberger in Filderstadt.

The work belongs to Columbus: In Search of a New Tomorrow — a landmark and historically significant portfolio project conceived by the NGO Artists United for Nature in aid of tropical rainforest preservation efforts, bringing together an extraordinary roster of artists, musicians, and cultural figures including Joseph Beuys, Christo, Sigmar Polke, Antoni Tàpies, Nam June Paik, and Mimmo Paladino, among many others. Lichtenstein's contribution to this environmentally and culturally significant undertaking is entirely characteristic of his practice at its most visually assured — applying his signature Ben-Day dot technique, bold black outlines, and flat planes of color to the depiction of a tree and its dense, layered canopy, transforming the natural subject of the rainforest into a composition of immediate Pop Art clarity and graphic precision.

In Rain Forest, the dotted blue sky and striped green ground — hallmarks of Lichtenstein's mechanical, mass-media-derived visual vocabulary — frame a richly textured canopy of green foliage rendered with a painterly, almost gestural density that distinguishes the work within his broader output. The collision between his characteristically flat, commercial-print aesthetic and the organic, ecological subject matter of the rainforest gives the work a particular conceptual resonance entirely appropriate to the conservationist purpose of the Columbus portfolio itself — a meditation on nature rendered through the visual language of mass reproduction, in the service of a cause concerned precisely with nature's preservation.

The work is in excellent condition.