ABU DHABI.- Gagosian will participate in Frieze Abu Dhabi with a solo presentation of sculptures, prints, drawings, and collages produced by Roy Lichtenstein between 1965 and 1995. This coincides with Roy Lichtenstein: Like New, a major retrospective that opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, on October 11.

In the Abu Dhabi presentation, portraits, landscapes, interiors, and still life compositions reinforce the essential role of work on paper in the American Pop art progenitor’s oeuvre. These works offer an array of characteristically witty and arresting images that together form an index to their maker’s thematic preoccupations and unmistakable visual language. Through series of drawings and prints in particular, Lichtenstein alludes to art historical styles, establishing sequences within which conventional representation shifts gradually toward more abstract interpretation.

By the early 1970s, many artists were treating print processes that had previously been dismissed as exclusively commercial with a new degree of seriousness. These figures included Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and, of course, Lichtenstein—three late screen prints by whom are among the works on view that embody this enhanced status. Wallpaper with Blue Floor Interior (1992) is the largest and most complex example; originally designed to be adhered directly to the wall, it is printed in thirty-six colors on five abutted panels. Here, Lichtenstein pursues his investigation of simplified graphic representation, specifically the language of commercial illustration, by suggesting that an art object could be made accessible by giving it a utilitarian function, and by rendering an everyday subject in Pop art’s hard lines, flat colors, and graphic patterns.

In the painted aluminum sculpture Wall Pyramid (1997, cast 2002), Lichtenstein represents one of the Great Pyramids of Giza, a subject portrayed elsewhere in the booth in four drawings from the late 1960s and a screen print from 1968 that folds into an ingenious three-dimensional model. Reflecting the artist’s interests in geometry and the built environment, these works also evoke the spiritual significance of abstraction in North African and Middle Eastern visual culture. Lichtenstein transforms the vast ancient structures into patterns of triangles and, in the drawings, pares their surrounding landscapes down to fields of blue, yellow, and white in order to focus the viewer’s attention on the purity of their angular compositions. Acknowledging the artistic climate of the time in which they were produced, they also allude to the then-dominant aesthetic of Minimalism; pyramidal shapes and forms were also popular with Sol LeWitt and Dan Flavin, who responded to their combination of grandeur and simplicity.