Bedroom
Bedroom
Signed Print
Roy Lichtenstein
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143 x 200cm, Edition of 60, Screenprint
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Meaning & Analysis
Bedroom belongs to Roy Lichtenstein’s Interior series. Created towards the end of the artist’s career, the series of prints was inspired by ordinary furniture advertisements that the artist collected from his everyday surroundings. Taking the ultimate image of quotidian domesticity, the collection of interiors are rendered in Lichtenstein’s characteristic palette of bold primary colours, delineated outlines and Ben-day dots, and reflect the artist’s fascination with the paradoxical relationship between fine art and design. The series is a unique contribution the artist’s career, with many of the conceptual ideas and skills that he acquired in the preceding years culminating in this body of work. For example, the works in the Interior Serieswere created using a combination of printing techniques including lithography, woodcut and screenprint that Lichtenstein had perfected throughout his career thus far.
The unusual composition of Bedroom, takes a single corner of the room, cropping out most of the bed and the furniture, focusing instead on the sparse table, screen, window and single painting hanging on the wall directly ahead of us. The strident, parallel black outlines create a pattern in themselves, and the window points to Lichtenstein’s career-long fascination with the visual effects of light and reflection.
The Interior series is characterised by a highly stylised aesthetic of mundane domestic spaces, that are subsequently transformed by Lichtenstein's use of contrasting black outline and contour, regimented pattern and block colour, as well as flat surface planes and distorted perspective. Lichtenstein borrows artistic techniques from the commercial printing industry in his work. However, Lichtenstein was sophisticated in his adaptation of the visual language of popular culture. In his own words, "I am nominally copying, but I am really restating the copied thing in other terms. In doing that, the original acquires a totally different texture. It isn't thick or thin brushstrokes, it's dots and flat colours and unyielding lines." By taking such a pervasive visual style of commercial design and incorporating it into his own designs, his work spoke to a large audience that to this day can appreciate and engage with his images. The familiarity of the domestic space is enhanced and reinvented by Lichtenstein’s aesthetic.
Lichtenstein was a leading figure in the Pop Art movement during the second half of the 20th century. Born in Manhattan in 1923, his distinctive artistic style is inspired by the visual language of consumerism and advertising that pervaded American popular culture at the time. His work was exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City. His work speaks to universal themes of love, beauty and human emotion and reflects a contemporary commercialist society, making it relevant to this day. Lichtenstein borrowed artistic techniques from the commercial printing industry in his work. This offers a distinctive and culturally relevant aesthetic that evokes the artist’s contemporary consumer culture of mass production and advertising.