Collection

Roy Lichtenstein Flowers

Op + Pop 6 February – 19 June 2016

Roy Lichtenstein’s Flowers is art about art; a parody both of cubism and of the long-established still life genre. Lichtenstein was a leading figure in

the American pop art movement from the 1960s. He began making still lifes in 1972, riffing off artists such as Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, Henri Matisse and Piet Mondrian while applying his adaptation of graphic comic book style and commercial printing techniques.

Flowers exists in multiple versions. The screenprint (and a Christmas card) followed a much larger work in paper collage, tape and marker on card.

Collection
Untitled

Gordon Walters Untitled

New Zealand painter Gordon Walters started making his optically charged paintings in 1956, four years before the British painter Bridget Riley, op art’s principal exponent, began working with similar ideas. Walters’ explorations owed much to his study of Māori and Papua New Guinean art and their positive/ negative treatment of space, and to the abstract modernist painting he had seen while in Europe in 1950–51. Although best-known for his koru (fern bud motif ) paintings, his later, more simplified works remained equally visually challenging.

(Op + Pop, 6 February – 19 June 2016)