"These pieces exist between painting and sculpture in terms not only of genre but also of structure; where Minimalist objects are neither painting nor sculpture…Pop objects tend to be both-and if most representational painting is a two-dimensional encoding of three-dimensional objects, Lichtenstein reverses the process here, and freezes it somewhere in between."
Daring in its conceptual wit and dazzling in execution, Woman: Sunlight, Moonlight stands as a defining stat.mes nt of Roy Lichtenstein’s sculptural oeuvre and a profound meditation on image, illusion, and form. Executed in 1996, just one year prior to the artist’s unexpected death, Woman: Sunlight, Moonlight is a seminal artwork in the groundbreaking series of flat profile sculptures pioneered by Lichtenstein in the 1990s and is one of two unique examples of the form executed in wood in preparation for the bronze edition of six, the second of which currently resides in the collects ion of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Examples from the bronze edition are held in esteemed collects ions including The Broad in Los Angeles and have been included in over nine major exhibitions including Lichtenstein's landmark retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago and the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. Bearing exceptional provenance, the present work has remained in the collects ion of Dorothy and Roy Lichtenstein since its creation. Presented to the public market for the very first t.mes , Woman: Sunlight, Moonlight is a thrilling evocation of Roy Lichtenstein's singular process and a remarkable opportunity to acquire an innovative and unprecedented masterpiece.
Executed with Lichtenstein’s signature graphic precision, Woman: Sunlight, Moonlight is a thrilling exploration of the female figure in the artist’s late career as part of his reinterpretation of art history, blending his own celebrated output to create new works of art. Woman: Sunlight, Moonlight presents a stylized female bust rendered in a flat two-sided profile that boldly disrupts sculptural convention. Drawn from the visual vocabulary of 1960s romance comics, in this case the popular romance comic book Secret Hearts, the subject in Woman: Sunlight, Moonlight is at once iconic and archetypal, embodying Lichtenstein’s enduring exploration of mass media’s portrayal of feminine beauty. A pioneer of the Pop Art movement, Lichtenstein gained popularity and acclaim in the early 1960s for his “Girl Paintings” in which he appropriated the cliched archetypes of female beauty from comic books and magazines, brilliantly blurring the boundaries of high and low art. Woman: Sunlight, Moonlight is a triumphant re-emergence of the female figure in the artist's work after a lengthy period away from the comic-book inspired motif and exemplifies Lichtenstein’s ability to not only contend with art historical precedent and the contemporary pop culture vernacular, but also to reflect upon his own practice across media and t.mes . Woman: Sunlight, Moonlight reimagines its melancholic heroine as a luminous dual sided bust. Split along a central axis, her visage fractures into two distinct moods or opposing atmospheres, one face radiating the warm tones of daylight with vivid reds and canary yellows, and the other immersed in the cool blues of moonlight. Striking and alluring, she is Lichtenstein’s t.mes less muse, forever poised between the rising sun and the falling night.
“A sculpture from any viewpoint should work the way a drawing works, which is a two-dimensional thing."
Precise contours and graphic angles animate the surface of Woman: Sunlight, Moonlight with electric tension. Through his iconic Ben-Day dots, bold outlines and graphic color, the artist's unmistakable visual lexicon is deftly transposed from the canvas to three-dimensional space. From certain angles, the figure appears almost like a cut-out, a drawing sprung into space; while from others, the figure’s profile sharpens into uncanny dimensionality. As the artist himself described, “a sculpture from any viewpoint should work the way a drawing works, which is a two-dimensional thing." (the artist quoted in: Richard Calvocoressi, Roy Lichtenstein Sculptor, 2013, p. 42) Lichtenstein transforms a traditionally volumetric medium into a site of pictorial experimentation: sharp outlines and clusters of diagonal lines prompt the viewer to conjure depth and mass, suggesting a sense of three-dimensionality despite inherent flatness of the form. Disintegrating and reanimating space simultaneously, Woman: Sunlight, Moonlight furthers the boundaries of the medium, challenging the very substance and definition of sculpture as a necessarily three-dimensional form of expression. As Hal Foster describes, "these pieces exist between painting and sculpture in terms not only of genre but also of structure; where Minimalist objects are neither painting nor sculpture…Pop objects tend to be both-and if most representational painting is a two-dimensional encoding of three-dimensional objects, Lichtenstein reverses the process here, and freezes it somewhere in between." (Hal Foster, 'Pop Pygmalion, in: Exh. Cat., London, Gagosian Gallery, Roy Lichtenstein Sculpture, 2005, p. 10) Through exacting precision and controlled simplicity, Lichtenstein collapses the traditional boundaries of painting, drawing, and sculpture into a unified, hybrid form.
Across media and form, Roy Lichtenstein has probed the semiotics of space and perspective, volume and mass, through his distinctive visual lexicon of color and line. A tour de force of visual wit and technical innovation, Woman: Sunlight, Moonlight is both an homage to and an evolution of Lichtenstein’s most enduring motifs rendered with a masterful sense of visual acuity. Flat yet full of volume, light yet monumental in presence, Woman: Sunlight, Moonlight is a triumph of paradox, simultaneously image and object, illusion and structure. A striking meditation on duality, perception, and the language of image-making, Woman: Sunlight, Moonlight is more than a mere translation of two-dimensional imagery, urging the viewer not just to reflect on the material object, but the act of viewing itself.
