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Lot Essay
Keen to reclaim artistic territory that he had made his own in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Blake set himself the task in the late 1980s of producing new variants on his groundbreaking Pop works. These pictures, many of them collage-based, were a riposte to the appropriationist tendencies that were much to the fore during the decade that was then ending. In his catalogue note for Déja vu at the Nishimura Gallery in Tokyo in May 1988, the exhibition at which these cheeky self-quotations were first shown, he remarked that it was 'better to have ripped myself off, than to have been "ripped off"'. So it was that he revisited some of the many inventive solutions to picture-making, as well as favoured images, that were by then firmly established as key elements of his aesthetic repertoire and personal iconography. There is a great deal of paradoxical play, humour and wit in these works: paintings combining boldly coloured formal devices with found photographs and postcards, wholly handpainted pictures masquerading as sign paintings and found objects, weather-beaten found objects presented within a new framework and with typographic additions as original paintings, and assemblages of ready-made objects such as toys and ephemera showcased in cabinets of his own making.
The Déja vu series proved to be perfectly timed for a resurgence of interest in Pop Art, and for the influence of its methods on the work of the Young British Artists that he was soon to count among his friends, including Damien Hirst, Gavin Turk, Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas. Buoyed by the critical and commercial success of the Tokyo exhibition and by his joy in taking up many strands of his youthful work that he found still contained many unexplored possibilities, Blake embarked on a second exhibition of new works, this time for the Wetterling Gallery in Gothenburg, Sweden in May 1990, focussed exclusively on images 'in homage to Marilyn Monroe'. Raiding his collection of old magazines, postcards and secondhand Americana and purchasing new material specifically for this purpose, he returned in particular to the language of the Pop collage paintings that remained among his most radical artistic statements. This time, however, he expressed his ambition in a dramatic increase in scale from those early, intimately sized, objects.
Shrine to Marilyn Monroe, in a Texas Diner, by far the largest of the works made for the Wetterling exhibition, moves into an environmental scale reminiscent of the walk-in environments of Ed and Nancy Kienholz. (Its closest equivalent in terms of scope and size, a shrine to Elvis Presley housed within a garden shed, was conceived at that time but abandoned once the artist noticed that sheds were becoming a cliché in contemporary art installations.) A devotion to the dazzling beauty and glamour of the actress who had also been celebrated by Blake's rival Andy Warhol here takes on a manic energy, her features repeated across the wall of a blue-collar eatery with the fervour that a devout Catholic might expend on a home-made oratory to a favourite saint. Given Marilyn's tragic early end by suicide in 1962, the suggestion of a private passion within the secular context of contemporary commercial society adds a melancholy poignancy to an otherwise joyful and nostalgic celebration of one of the great stars of our age.
We are very grateful to Marco Livingstone for preparing this catalogue entry.
The Déja vu series proved to be perfectly timed for a resurgence of interest in Pop Art, and for the influence of its methods on the work of the Young British Artists that he was soon to count among his friends, including Damien Hirst, Gavin Turk, Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas. Buoyed by the critical and commercial success of the Tokyo exhibition and by his joy in taking up many strands of his youthful work that he found still contained many unexplored possibilities, Blake embarked on a second exhibition of new works, this time for the Wetterling Gallery in Gothenburg, Sweden in May 1990, focussed exclusively on images 'in homage to Marilyn Monroe'. Raiding his collection of old magazines, postcards and secondhand Americana and purchasing new material specifically for this purpose, he returned in particular to the language of the Pop collage paintings that remained among his most radical artistic statements. This time, however, he expressed his ambition in a dramatic increase in scale from those early, intimately sized, objects.
Shrine to Marilyn Monroe, in a Texas Diner, by far the largest of the works made for the Wetterling exhibition, moves into an environmental scale reminiscent of the walk-in environments of Ed and Nancy Kienholz. (Its closest equivalent in terms of scope and size, a shrine to Elvis Presley housed within a garden shed, was conceived at that time but abandoned once the artist noticed that sheds were becoming a cliché in contemporary art installations.) A devotion to the dazzling beauty and glamour of the actress who had also been celebrated by Blake's rival Andy Warhol here takes on a manic energy, her features repeated across the wall of a blue-collar eatery with the fervour that a devout Catholic might expend on a home-made oratory to a favourite saint. Given Marilyn's tragic early end by suicide in 1962, the suggestion of a private passion within the secular context of contemporary commercial society adds a melancholy poignancy to an otherwise joyful and nostalgic celebration of one of the great stars of our age.
We are very grateful to Marco Livingstone for preparing this catalogue entry.