Through to September 7, Cristea Roberts Gallery presents REMASTERED, an exhibition showcasing the work of artists who engage with the tradition of appropriation, featuring Georg Baselitz, Michael Craig-Martin, Dexter Dalwood, Jim Dine, Richard Hamilton, Idris Khan, Roy Lichtenstein, Julian Opie, Paula Rego, Francis Ruyter, Yinka Shonibare CBE, Tom Wesselmann, and Paul Winstanley.
While focusing on contemporary and modern artists, the exhibition explores iconic symbols and references from art history through a selection of prints and works on paper.
It opens with Roy Lichtenstein’s (1923 – 1997) 1973 Bull Profile Series, which reimagines two iconic modern pictorial styles. This series draws inspiration from Pablo Picasso’s Le Taureau (1945-1946), with Lichtenstein reworking Picasso’s bull into a sequence that ultimately pays homage to both Picasso and Piet Mondrian.
For Pop artists, appropriation was a vital tool, allowing them to borrow, sample, and re-use elements of popular culture and each other’s work. Tom Wesselmann’s (1931 – 2004) Still Life with Lichtenstein and Two Oranges (1993) directly references Lichtenstein while also nodding to the classical still life theme.
Jim Dine, ‘Color on Her’, 2009
The exhibition also highlights works by Richard Hamilton (1922 – 2011). His Horne’s House (1981-1982), a lift-ground aquatint and engraving, illustrates an episode from James Joyce’s modernist novel Ulysses. Hamilton parallels Joyce’s linguistic progression with an art historical progression, alluding to figures such as Cézanne, Bellini, Picasso, and Easter Island stone sculptures. Also featured is Hamilton’s Picasso’s Meninas (1973), an etching combining Picasso’s graphic style with Diego Velázquez’s famous composition, Las Meninas (1656).
Paula Rego, renowned for her paintings and intaglio prints based on nursery rhymes, literature, and mythology, will feature in REMASTERED with her After Hogarth series (2000). This series is inspired by William Hogarth’s eighteenth-century series Marriage-a-la-Mode (1743), which critiques marrying for money. In Rego’s aquatints, gender norms are flipped, as her female protagonist wields power in this reimagining of Hogarth’s satirical narrative.
Michael Craig-Martin, ‘Seurat (green)’, 2022
Georg Baselitz contributes portraits of Lucio Fontana and Robert Rauschenberg, while Dexter Dalwood draws inspiration from Eugène Delacroix’s Women of Algiers in their Apartment (1834). Yinka Shonibare CBE’s Modern Spiritual (2023) woodblock series incorporates Picasso’s harlequin motif while reclaiming African masks, which greatly influenced modernist art. Jim Dine (b. 1935) presents two etchings styled after the Venus de Milo, a theme frequently revisited in his work.
Paul Winstanley presents alpine landscapes inspired by Romanticism, while Francis Ruyter draws on Depression-era photographer Dorothea Lange’s work to reinvent her documentary style through relief prints, focusing on the Dust Bowl of the 1930s Midwest.
Roy Lichtenstein, ‘Bull Profile Series (6)’, 1973
The exhibition concludes with Michael Craig-Martin’s version of Georges Seurat’s post-Impressionist masterpiece Bathers at Asnières (1884). Rendered in Craig-Martin’s vivid color palette, this piece offers a fresh perspective on Seurat’s iconic work.
Header
Tom Wesselmann, Still life with Lichtenstein and Two Oranges, 1993
