Castelli Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein – Walls. The exhibition will include paintings, drawings and collages dating from the early 1970s to the 1990s, some of which have never been shown before.

The exhibition focuses on the idea of taking a portion of a wall as the subject-matter for a work of art, an idea probably rooted in the great tradition of American 'trompe l’oeil' painting. It intends to show how Johns and Lichtenstein, working at different times and under different circumstances, somehow reinvented this tradition, and elaborated it in a unique way.

Included in the exhibition will be Jasper Johns’ paintings Untitled, 1984, in which, taped on a wall, we see the detail of a “Flag”; and Untitled, 1988, in which a well-known Picasso image hangs on a wooden wall. References to the work of Modern Masters and self-references appear in Roy Lichtenstein’s works as well: in Trompe L’oeil with Leger Head and Paintbrush, 1973, the artist is including an image from Leger; while Dagwood, in Collage for Two Paintings: Dagwood, 1983, can be seen as related to the use of cartoons earlier in the artist’s career.

Above all, the works in the exhibition seem to create a space in which the boundaries between the artwork and the actual physical wall may be perceived as broken, and the viewer is faced with seeing paintings painted in a painting.

The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalog.