Lichtenstein, Roy

* 27.10.1923 New York - † 1997

biography

Roy Lichtenstein, born in New York on October 27, 1923, was the most consistent painter of Pop Art. In his works, Lichtenstein took popular pictorial formulas from comics, advertising and cartoons or well-known works of art and painting styles from their usual context. The alienation effect created by this contributed to the symbolization of consumer contexts, similar to the works of Andy Warhol. Roy Lichtenstein's works were serious attempts to bridge the gap between so-called "highbrow art", the high art, and "lowbrow art", the trivial and popular. This was the first time that painting reflected on the technical possibilities that a work of art had in the age of its technical reproducibility. Roy Lichtenstein designed his pictures using raster techniques, clear contrasts and a restriction to basic colors in the effect of cheap prints. Lichtenstein thus created pictorial symbols that every viewer soon associated with the term Pop Art. By replacing the painterly texture of conventional painting with an industrial texture by limiting printing techniques to raster dots, Roy Lichtenstein created the necessary critical distance in the viewer, which made them aware of the unconscious consumption of mass products such as comics or pictures. Roy Lichtenstein died at the end of September 1997 at the age of 73.