Roy Lichtenstein: Nudes and Interiors

FEBRUARY 8 - MAY 17, 2014

Curated by Ewan Gibbs and Hilary Harkness
Organized in collaboration with the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation

Roy Lichtenstein: Nudes and Interiors includes 37 works by Roy Lichtenstein, including drawing, collage, and sculpture as well two original works created by our curators in conjunction with the exhibition. In Drawing from Inspiration and A Nude of One’s Own, the essays prepared for the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, Ewan Gibbs and Hilary Harkness reveal themselves to be artists meditating on the creative process with Lichtenstein in the foreground.  What does it mean to make art through time; what does it mean to pay homage; what does it mean to create an artistic space that can accommodate one’s cognitive and passionate impulses? Their reflections are as artists who have been at work for over a decade and who share a vantage point that is both of their time and of artists throughout time.

Gibbs and Harkness note a number of influences shared with Lichtenstein, including paying homage to artists such as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso—artists whose works (and lives) have sustained and nourished the curators’ creative processes.  The preparatory works featured in the show resonated with both curators for the clues the works leave behind with respect to Lichtenstein’s efforts, his fervor, and his passion.  Clues sometimes overlooked in the fully realized collages and paintings that would follow.

Harkness finds Lichtenstein’s ability to assimilate high and low visual influences into a language that was his own inspiring.  For this show, she has chosen to feature Lichtenstein’s late nudes, many of which were painted when he was in his seventies at a time when Harkness observes, he no longer had anything to prove and nothing to lose and which results in works laced with a palpable joie de vivre. Gibbs approaches Lichtenstein’s interiors from a place of comfort and familiarity, having worked directly from photographs of hotel rooms taken from holiday brochures since 1993.  It was Lichtenstein, with his use of pictures from comics, phone books and advertisements, who provided Gibbs with a feeling of artistic freedom and confidence to use mass-produced advertising images as source material.

As Harkness observes, “painting grows out of the personal.  There are times when we have to fight it, sometimes we submit to it, sometimes we let go of it.  But always – it is there and we have to figure out what we’re going to do about it.” In this exhibition, artists-cum-curators invite us to take a glimpse into the world of Lichtenstein’s interiors and his nudes,  wa world packed with the indelible marks of a career that spanned decades and integrated a variety of artistic influences.

About: 

Ewan Gibbs (b. 1973, London, United Kingdom) is an artist living and working in Oxfordshire, United Kingdom. Gibbs received a BFA from Goldsmiths College, University of London, United Kingdom, in 1996. Recent solo exhibitions include New York/Chicago, Richard Gray Gallery, New York, NY (2019); Crossing America, Baldwin Gallery, Aspen, CO (2016); Arlington National Cemetery, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX (2012); among others. Gibbs’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including Drawn Together Again, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY (2019); Roy Lichtenstein: Intimate Sculptures, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY (2014); personal, political, mysterious, Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin, TX, (2013); among others. His drawings are included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Tate Gallery, London; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; The Fogg Art Museum, Harvard, MA; The Denver Art Museum, CO; among others. Gibbs’s work has been the subject of reviews and articles in publications including Artforum, Art + Auction, Glass Tire, The New York Times, among others.

Hilary Harkness (b. 1971, Detroit, MI) is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Harkness graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California, Berkeley, CA, in 1993, and received an MFA from Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT, in 1996. A former professional violinist, Harkness honed her unique artistic worldview while living in San Francisco, CA, and now lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been exhibited worldwide, including the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain, the Deste Foundation in Athens, Greece, and is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. Harkness has been featured in publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Interview Magazine, Esquire, among others. She taught painting and sculpture as Artist in Residence at Yale Summer School of Art and Music, New Haven, CT, and has lectured widely at institutions such as Columbia University, Boston University, Yale University, Brandeis University, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. In 2013, Hilary co-curated Roy Lichtenstein: Nudes and Interiors at The FLAG Art Foundation. Harkness blogs for the Huffington Post. She is represented by Mary Boone Gallery, New York, NY.

Purchase Catalogue