Got to Be Real

Vija Celmins, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha, Kiki Smith, Wayne Thiebaud, Andy Warhol

Susan Sheehan Gallery is pleased to present Got to Be Real, a group exhibition that explores the role of figuration in post-war printmaking.

The dominance of Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s and 50s was followed by a period of renewed engagement with the everyday world. From Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein's use of mass-media imagery to Vija Celmins's detailed studies of the natural environment, figuration emerged as a means of both critically investigating the present and participating in the art historical traditions of the past.

In Birth of Venus and Crying Girl, Warhol and Lichtenstein explore the visual implications of consumer culture. Warhol's screenprint reinterprets Sandro Botticelli's Renaissance masterpiece through a Pop Art lens, blurring the distinction between high art and popular culture. Crying Girl, a magnified portrait of a woman from a popular DC Comics series, employs Lichtenstein's Ben-Day dot and comic-book aesthetic to emphasize the clichés of commercially printed imagery.

Ed Ruscha extends this inquiry to the topography of Los Angeles in Hollywood in the Rain and Hollywood with Observatory. The city's mythology is an enduring source of inspiration for the artist, who reimagines his iconic motif in a rare black-and-white palette. Invoking the formal conventions of film noir, Ruscha alludes to the cultural fantasies propagated by the entertainment hub.

David Hockney and Wayne Thiebaud's engagement with the still life genre reflects their shared interest in the lineage of art history. Sun, from Hockney's 1973 Weather Series, draws on the Japanese Ukiyo-e tradition to depict the play of light as it falls across a potted plant. Thiebaud's Bow Ties and Shoe Rows similarly transform everyday objects into sites of formal experimentation, translating the rich color and three-dimensionality of his paintings into print.