Compote with Fruit and Shadow

Material

Enamel on laser-cut-steel; 207 x 137.2 cm

Dating

1989

About the artist

Next to Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, the American painter and assemblage artist belongs to the most renowned representatives of Pop Art. After finishing his psychology studies, Wesselmann served in the army in Korea for two years. When he returned in 1954, he studied at the Art Academy in Cincinnati and at the Cooper Union College for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York.
In the 1960s he began to transfer classical painting genres into Pop Art. He and Robert Rauschenberg were significantly involved in refining the assemblage, a synthesis of painting and every-day objects. His paintings deal with questions of truth and illusion, art and everyday life, as well as spatiality and surface.
Like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein he drew much inspiration from adverts from the 1960s and 1970s. Wesselmann is mainly known for his ‘American Nudes’, a series of large scale nudes, which provoke with their sexual explicitness. Around 1983 he produced nudes and still lifes on metal plates by transferring his sketches on the plates and cutting them out with a laser.
Tom Wesselmann’s works have been shown at numerous solo and group exhibitions all over the world. Many of his works are on display in well-known museums in the US, Europe and Japan.