Art Basel Miami Preview Catalogue

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SUSAN SHEEHAN GALLERY 2022

On the cover: Roy Lichtenstein Bull III, from the complete set of six mixed media prints, 1973

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SUSAN SHEEHAN GALLERY

136 East 16th Street New York, NY 10003 212-489-3331 info@susansheehangallery.com www.susansheehangallery.com

Cheese Mold Standard with Olive, 1969

Screenprint

Sheet size: 25 5/8 x 39 7/8 inches

Printer: Jean Milant and Daniel Socha at the artist’s studio, Hollywood, California

Publisher: The Artist

Edition: 150, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Enberg 31

Signed, numbered, and dated

Ed Ruscha

Mocha Standard, 1969

Screenprint

Sheet size: 25 3/4 x 40 1/16 inches

Printer: Jean Milant and Daniel Socha at the artist’s studio, Hollywood, California

Publisher: The Artist

Edition: 100, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Enberg 30

Signed, numbered, and dated

Ed Ruscha in his studio, Venice, California

Made in California, 1971

Lithograph

Sheet size: 20 x 27 7/8 inches

Printer: Cirrus Editions, Los Angeles

Publisher: Grunewald Graphic Arts Foundation, University of California, Los Angeles

Edition: 100, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Enberg 52

Initialed, numbered, and dated

Few artists of the 20th century are as synonymous with California as Ed Ruscha (b. 1937). He arrived in Los Angeles from Omaha, Nebraska in 1956 to attend the Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts) and immediately began an artistic love affair with the natural and built environments of California. Two years later he completed a printing apprenticeship, quickly embracing the ease of reproducibility and collaborative nature of the process. Printmaking thus lies at the heart of Ruscha’s artistic practice, enabling him to return to certain approaches over time. For example, his work commonly explores how typeface and text color impact the legibility of a phrase, and Made in California is a key example of this line of inquiry. The print features one of Ruscha’s most iconic lithographic techniques: letters so expertly printed that they appear to be made of water droplets. However, in other prints of this kind from 1971, Ruscha uses light-blue paper, a seem ingly fitting choice for the liquid font, but Made in California was printed on a vibrant shade of orange-yellow.

The print’s titular phrase, “Made in California,” is characteristically enigmatic and can be read in a variety of ways. Perhaps it speaks generally to Los Angeles’s then-emerging position as a cultural hub in the United States. Perhaps it is personal, describing how Ruscha found and osten sibly “made” himself in Los Angeles. Or perhaps it is political, alluding to the decline of Califor nia’s previously booming auto manufacturing industry in the early 1970s, and the rise of imports in this and many other industries at the same time. Regardless of its meaning, through his use of the trompe l’oeil water typography, Ruscha seems to suggest that the phrase is unstable or tran sient, at risk of evaporating or being wiped away. Clear yet illegible, permanent yet ephemeral, declarative yet inscrutable, Made in California bears all the hallmarks of the Pop inflections and tongue-in-cheek witticism for which Ruscha is best known.

Ed Ruscha with his books, 1970

Bull Profile Series, 1973

Screenprint, lithograph, and linocut

Sheet size: 27 x 35 inches, each

Printer and Publisher: Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles

Edition: 100, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Corlett 116-121

Each sheet is signed, dated, and numbered in pencil, lower margin

The complete set of six mixed media prints

Over the course of six prints, Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997) progressively simplifies and abstracts a Hol stein cow, a sequence only comprehensible when the series is seen in its entirety. Lichtenstein directly quotes Picasso’s lithographic series The Bull (Le taureau), 1946, and Theo van Doesburg’s pencil stud ies for The Cow, 1916–1917, in which bovines are incrementally rendered abstract. These precedents testify to the modernist belief that universal truth could be revealed through distillation and abstrac tion. Lichtenstein, though, parodies this faith by calling into question the presumed distinction between “realistic” and “abstract” depictions. The stylized, wavy, black patterning in Bull I that calls to mind Old Master woodcuts or line engravings reverberates with the crisp, diagonal cross-hatching in the subsequent prints. This visual rhyme calls attention to the fact that, as Lichtenstein put it, “The series pretends to be didactic; I’m giving you abstraction lessons. But nothing is more abstract than anything else to me. The first one is abstract; they’re all abstract.”

Taking guidance from a photograph in a 1970 cattle sales catalog, Lichtenstein based the prints in the Bull Profile series on drawings he made in New York and subsequently reworked at Gemini as prepa ratory collages. “I didn’t want to destroy the bull in doing it, you know, because whatever else I was doing, it had to look like a bull. I mean, all of the marks . . . are made for other reasons, but it can’t look unlike a bull, it would be inconsistent with the idea.” Lichtenstein’s interest in progressively abstract ing a bovine is further manifested in Bull Head Series, a three-lithograph series also made at Gemini in 1973. He revisited the subject again the following year in the three preparatory studies for the Cow Triptych (Cow Going Abstract) painting, which was produced as a tri-part poster in 1982.

Roy Lichtenstein working on Bull Profile Series, 1973

Afternoon Swimming, 1979

Lithograph

Sheet size: 31 3/4 x 39 1/2 inches

Printer and Publisher: Tyler Graphics Ltd., Bedford, New York

Edition: 55 plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: MCAT 233

Signed, dated, and numbered

Josef Albers

Soft Edge - Hard Edge, 1965

Screenprints

Sheet size: 17 x 17 inches, each

Printer: Sirocco Screenprints, New Haven, Connecticut

Publisher: Ives-Sillman, New Haven, Connecticut

Edition: 250, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Danilowitz 165

The complete portfolio of 10 screenprints and title pages with the original portfolio box and slipcase

Ellsworth Kelly Red, 2005

Lithograph

Sheet size: 33 1/4 x 29 7/8 inches

Printer and Publisher: Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles Edition: 50, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Axsom 327

Signed and numbered

Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015) was a pioneer in the Color Field and Hard-edge movements whose minimalist paintings, sculptures, and prints explore the power of pure color and form over gesture. This large-scale lithograph, Red, from 2005, is among his most striking late prints and depicts a large-scale trapezium, a four-sided shape with no parallel sides. The bright red form appears tautly suspended on the white page, as if it might burst from its confining edges at any moment.

The remarkable energy of Red stems largely from Kelly’s masterful balance of negative and printed space, which renders the unprinted area just as vital as the red shape. Negative space plays an important role in all of Kelly’s prints and paintings. In fact, he once remarked that the margins surrounding the forms in his paintings and prints were “thought out as much as color and shape” and that “negative space is just as powerful as the space of the object.”

Red’s mesmerizing energy also derives from the punchy shade of the eponymous color Kelly chose for the lithograph. Kelly experimented with three other shades of red in trial proofs before landing on the bright vermilion shade seen in the final print. This characteristically careful approach to color alludes to why Kelly chose lithography for this print: he felt litho graphic inks, dense and greasy, could achieve richer planes of color than the inks used in screenprinting, a preference echoed in his choice of oil paint over acrylic when working on canvas. Red thus exemplifies the close connections between his printmaking and painting practices both in technique and composition.

Ellsworth Kelly at Peter Carlson Enterprises, Sun Valley, Idaho, 1996

Ellsworth Kelly

Yellow, 1973-75

Lithograph

Printer and Publisher: Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles

Edition: 48, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Axsom 107

Signed and numbered

Ellsworth Kelly

Blue Red-Orange Green, 1970-71

Lithograph

Sheet size: 42 1/2 x 30 inches

Printer and Publisher: Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles Edition: 64, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Axsom 75

Signed and inscribed

Jasper Johns Cicada, 1979

Screenprint

Portfolio: Marginalia Hommage to Shimizu

Sheet size: 22 x 18 1/8 inches

Printer: Simca Print Artists Inc., New York

Publisher: Jasper Johns and Simca Print Artist, Inc., New York

Edition: 100, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: ULAE 204

Signed, numbered, and dated

Beginning in the 1970s, Jasper Johns (b. 1937) began experimenting with the crosshatching motif. The original pattern was based mostly upon a deconstruction of an Edvard Munch self-portrait, Between the Clock and the Bed. The bedspread in Munch’s 1943 painting contained a crosshatch ing pattern Johns would reference throughout the 1970s and early 1980s in his paintings, drawings, and prints. Seemingly chaotic and created at random, Johns’ crosshatchings are in fact governed by print-based pat terns of reversal, repetition, and rotation arranged according to complex systems.

Upon close inspection of the crosshatching in the prints entitled, Cicada, a cylindrical pattern emerges. The crosshatching on the right edge matches that on the left, so one can imagine them overlapping and being a contin uation on both sides. This play on space becomes particularly apparent in this Cicada with its lettering. Conceivably this is an homage to the cylin drical press used with newspaper printing thereby echoing the reproduc tive process as well as its perspectival representation.

Cicada has a painterly quality achieved by layering additional screens over the same areas to reinforce the shapes and create the illusion of depth instead of the flat, sharp quality typical of screenprinting. Johns joked that trying to achieve depth of tone in a screenprint could be considered an abuse of the medium.

Cicada prints are included in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts, among many others.

Jasper Johns at Simca Print Artists, New York, 1980

Jasper Johns

Two Flags, 1980

Lithograph

Sheet size: 41 x 29 inches

Printer and Publisher: Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles Edition: 45, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: ULAE 212 Signed, dated, and numbered

Sunflower V, 1972

Etching with aquatint

Sheet size: 35 7/8 x 24 7/8 inches

Printer: Arte Adrien Maeght, Paris

Publisher: Maeght Editeur, Paris

Edition: 75, plus proofs

Signed and numbered

Joan Mitchell

Bedford II, 1981

Lithograph

Sheet size: 42 1/2 x 32 1/2 inches

Printer and Publisher: Tyler Graphics Ltd., Bedford, New York

Edition: 70, plus proofs

Signed and numbered

In 1981, Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) produced a series of prints at Kenneth Tyler’s workshop in Bedford, New York aptly titled the Bedford Series. The series includes several sub-groups, including Bedford, Sides of a River, Brush, and Flower. Bed ford II is among the most richly dense and painterly prints from the series, featur ing eight layers of colored ink, most of them aquamarine.

Endlessly seeking to translate her feelings into her art, Mitchell approached print making with the same openness to improvisation and revision with which she applied to painting. Aiming to facilitate Mitchell’s process of experimenting with color and composition, Tyler gave her sheets of Mylar on which to draw her im ages for the Bedford Series prints. The sheets could be layered easily to view an entire image or selections from it, and inspired Mitchell to incorporate more colors into these prints than she had used in any previous printed works. To execute the multifaceted prints, the printmakers transferred Mitchell’s drawings directly from the Mylar to lithographic plates.

Recalling the experience of working with Mitchell, Tyler once remarked, “I [had] never worked with anyone since [Josef] Albers that had such a keen knowledge of color and how colors interacted with each other.” In fact, Mitchell experienced synesthesia, wherein she associated certain people, sounds, and even words and letters with specific colors. This heightened sensitivity to color illuminates why Mitchell described her artworks as being “about a feeling that comes to me from the outside, from landscape.”

Although Mitchell had made many prints prior to 1981, Tyler Graphics was the first workshop she encountered where a full range of printmaking techniques were available to her. Tyler referred to the workshop as his “candy store,” and Mitchell embraced the broad expertise of the workshop whole-heartedly. Rather than learn the printing processes herself, she put her ideas in the hands of the printers, often asking Tyler, “which piece of candy do I get today?”

The success of Bedford II comes not only from its range of hues but also the rich density of the ink, which renders the print deceptively painterly. A true collabora tion between Mitchell and Tyler, the print is clearly the product of a master painter and master printer working together to marry aesthetic vision with technical skill.

Joan Mitchell and Ken Tyler at Tyler Graphics, 1992

Willem de Kooning

Untitled (Quatre Lithographies), 1986

Lithographs

Sheet size: 28 x 24 inches, each

Printer: Art Estampe, Paris

Publisher: Éditions de la Différence, Paris

Edition: 100, plus proofs

Each sheet is signed, dated, and numbered

The complete set of four lithographs

“Later, as I get older, it is such a nice thing to see a nice Matisse... When people say my later paintings are like Matisse, I say ‘You don’t say,’ and I’m very flattered.”

Willem de Kooning, c.1980, East Hampton

Helen Frankenthaler

Savage Breeze, 1974

Woodcut

Sheet size: 31 1/2 x 27 inches

Printer and Publisher: ULAE, West Islip, New York

Edition: 31, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Abrams 47

Signed, dated, and numbered

“There are no rules. That is how art is born.”
-Helen Frankenthaler

Candy Apples, 1987

Woodcut

Sheet size: 23 3/8 x 24 1/4 inches

Printer: Tadashi Toda at Shi-un-do Print Shop, Kyoto, Japan

Publisher: Crown Point Press, San Francisco

Edition: 200, plus proofs

Signed, dated, and numbered

Roy Lichtenstein

Brushstrokes, 1967

Screenprint

Sheet size: 23 x 31 inches

Printer: Aetna Silkscreen Products, New York

Publisher: Leo Castelli Gallery, for the Pasadena Art Museum, California

Edition: 300, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Abrams 47

Signed and numbered

Roy Lichtenstein

Landscape with Poet, 1996

Lithograph with screenprint

Sheet size: 90 1/4 x 36 inches

Printer and Publisher: Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles

Edition size: 60, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Corlett 238

Signed, dated, and numbered

David Hockney

Four Part Splinge, 1993

Lithograph and screenprint

Sheet size: 49 x 66 inches, on 4 sheets

Printer and Publisher: Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles

Edition: 48, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: MCAT 334

Signed, dated, numbered, and titled

SUSAN SHEEHAN GALLERY 136 East 16th Street New York, NY 10003 Tel: +1-212 489-3331

info@susansheehangallery.com www.susansheehangallery.com

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