ON VIEW

The sculpture Double Glass comes out of a body of work the artist made in the 1970s when Lichtenstein created a series of sculptures depicting drinking glasses as a way to investigate light, reflection, transparency, and mass. Double Glass is an elegant and witty distillation of the key attributes that have long characterized the artist’s work. Strong black outlines, bright primary colors, and raking diagonals translate into three dimensions the appearance of two ordinary glasses as they might appear in a commercial advertisement or one of the artist’s own paintings. Unlike traditional volumetric sculpture, this work is composed of thin areas of painted bronze that extend into space like the precise delineations of the artist’s brush. Each glass takes on a rounded, cylindrical shape, and gives the appearance of volume where there is nothing but negative space. Areas of bright white and bold yellow follow the curves of the glasses, while diagonals in black and dark blue are used to indicate shadow. Simple, broken black lines along the top and bottom edges imply the transparency of the glass itself, and therein, the visual trick of Lichtenstein’s technique is revealed: as sculpted line breaks into the surrounding space, the illusion of volume and mass is created.