Sunrise', colour offset lithograph on vellum, 1965, 44 cm x 59 cm plate dimension, 46.5 cm x 61.5 cm sheet dimension, signed, slightly curled, minimal handling marks, minimally raised at the edges, one edge slightly creased, literature: Wvz. Corlett II.7; Döring/von der Osten, Lichtenstein Posters, No. 11.
The American painter, graphic artist and sculptor, Roy Lichtenstein, is a main representative of Pop Art. He took his pictorial themes from the popular mass media: advertising, cartoons, newspaper illustrations, etc. He worked especially with comic strips. Above all, he worked with comic strips, which he could enlarge down to the grid points with the help of a projector. In this way he developed a wide variety of motifs, landscapes and still lifes. Lichtenstein translated them and experimented with them on paper and canvas, which then continued in sculptures. The present offset lithograph belongs to a series of works depicting landscapes that was created from 1964 onwards. Just as Lichtenstein otherwise monumentalised the banal, in this series the monumental is banalised. For ''[...] rigid, drawn strokes reflect a sunrise that cannot be pressed into unmoving forms in natura.'' The sheet consists of highly formalised and simplified design of an extensively detailed natural motif. Never would only the primary colours suffice to capture the actual natural and ever-changing beauty of the sky, the sun and its rays over the sea. Yet it is precisely the screening of the representation that is again characteristic of his works of these years. In this way, the artist emphasises the two-dimensionality of the motif and deprives it of any illusionistic spatial depth.
