Drew Leshko

"Sandwiches" Miniature Wall-Mounted Storefront Sign with Pepsi Logo

2024

This piece titled "The Point After" is original artwork made from paper, acrylic, enamel, pastel, wire, chain, aluminum, inkjet prints, pvc by Drew Leshko. This piece measures 16”h x...

This piece titled "Anna's Pizza" is original artwork made from paper, basswood, plaster, acrylic, enamel, watercolor, wire, pvc, pins, pastel, inkjet prints by Drew Leshko. This piec...

This piece titled "No Rats" is original artwork made from paper, inkjet print, enamel, wire, chain, aluminum tube, pastel by Drew Leshko. This piece measures 11”h x 1.5”w x 7.5”d. D...

This piece titled "Cigar" is original artwork made from paper, inkjet print, enamel, wire, chain, aluminum tube, pastel, toy cigar by Drew Leshko. This piece measures 12”h x 1”w x 7....

This exquisite silkscreen by Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997), titled Sandwich and Soda, originates from the landmark 1964 folio X + X (Ten Works by Ten Painters). Published by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, and printed by Sirocco Screenprints, Inc., North Haven, in Sandwich and Soda, Lichtenstein translates his signature Pop Art vocabulary—bold outlines, flat commercial color, and Ben-Day dot structure—into a crisp, iconic composition that reimagines everyday consumer imagery with graphic intensity and conceptual clarity. Executed as a silkscreen on Mylar over Mohawk Superfine Bristol paper, this work measures 20 x 24 inches. Unsigned and unnumbered as issued. Printed by Sirocco Screenprints, Inc., North Haven, one of the most capable American screenprinting ateliers of the mid-20th century. Artwork Details: Artist: Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997) Title: Sandwich and Soda, from X + X (Ten Works by Ten Painters), 1964 Medium: Silkscreen on Mylar over Mohawk Superfine Bristol paper Dimensions: 20 x 24 inches (50.8 x 60.96 cm) Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered as issued Date: 1964 Publisher: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford Printer: Sirocco Screenprints, Inc., North Haven Edition: D Catalogue raisonne reference: Corlett, Mary Lee, and Roy Lichtenstein. The Prints of Roy Lichtenstein: A Catalogue Raisonne 1948–1997. 2nd rev. ed., Hudson Hills Press in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Distributed in the U.S. by National Book Network, 2002, No. 35. Condition: Well preserved, consistent with age and medium Provenance: From the 1964 folio X + X (Ten Works by Ten Painters), published by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford Notes: Excerpted from the folio, This portfolio was commissioned and printed in an attempt to extend as much of the visual impact as possible of ten artists to paper and to make these prints available to collectors who might not otherwise have such a vivid slice of the artist. The dry surface of screening seemed to be most apt to translate the effect of their painting, both the flatness which is the unifying bond between the ten, and the insistance of paint on the surface of canvas so like the visible heft of ink on paper here. Samuel J. Wagstaff, Jr., Curator of Printings. About the Publication: X + X (Ten Works by Ten Painters), published in 1964 by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, stands as one of the most ambitious and influential printmaking endeavors of postwar American art. Conceived under the direction of curator Samuel J. Wagstaff, Jr., the project sought to capture and translate the defining visual languages of ten leading American painters of the era—Stuart Davis, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, Adolph Gottlieb, George Ortman, Larry Poons, Richard Anuszkiewicz, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein—into original silkscreens. Each artwork was created as an autonomous work that embodied the formal, chromatic, and conceptual principles of its respective artist. The choice of silkscreen printing, executed by Sirocco Screenprints, Inc., was central to the portfolio’s purpose: its dry, matte surface and capacity for crisp, saturated color allowed for a faithful translation of the painters’ flatness, surface tension, optical effects, and graphic precision. Organized and published by a major American museum at a moment of seismic change in contemporary art, X + X marked a turning point in institutional engagement with editioned works, representing one of the first concerted efforts by a museum to commission an ensemble of original graphics from the leading figures of its time. The portfolio captured the pulse of 1960s American painting—from Hard-Edge abstraction to Pop, Op, and Color Field—offering both a curated snapshot of artistic innovation and an accessible format that expanded the audience for contemporary art. Today, X + X is widely regarded as a landmark in American printmaking, celebrated for its curatorial vision, technical accomplishment, and its role in defining the dialogue between museum patronage and the burgeoning print culture of the 1960s. About the Artist: Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997) was an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor whose revolutionary elevation of comic-book graphics, Ben-Day dots, commercial illustration, and mass-media visual language into the realm of fine art made him one of the founding giants of Pop Art, drawing on the breakthroughs of Pablo Picasso, Alexander Calder, Alberto Giacometti, Salvador Dali, Joan Miro, Wassily Kandinsky, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray to synthesize Cubist fragmentation, Surrealist wit, Modernist experimentation, and Duchampian conceptualism into an unmistakable style defined by bold outlines, flat industrial color, graphic reduction, and the now-iconic Ben-Day dot technique; emerging in the 1960s alongside Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein shifted American art away from Abstract Expressionism toward a cool, analytical investigation of consumer culture, mass reproduction, advertising, and the manufactured image, creating paintings, prints, sculptures, and monumental public works that reimagined romance comics, war scenes, cartoons, brushstroke parodies, landscapes, and art-historical citations while offering a humorous yet incisive commentary on how images shape contemporary life; his influence is immense, shaping artists such as Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Damien Hirst, Julian Opie, KAWS, Banksy, and numerous contemporary painters, designers, fashion houses, and digital creators, while his works are held in major institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art, Tate, Centre Pompidou, SFMOMA, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and LACMA, with his highest auction record achieved when Nurse (1964) sold for 95,365,000 USD at Christie's New York on November 9, 2015. Roy Lichtenstein silkscreen...

ROY LICHTENSTEIN (1923-1997) Roy Lichtenstein 'Sandwich and Soda' was conceived in 1964 as part of the portfolio “Ten Works by Ten Painters.”. This work is unsigned and unnumbered p...

In the mid 1990s Richard Klein started working with found glass objects, including bottles, drinking glasses, ashtrays, and eyeglasses. Initially, Klein rejected any object with commercial or advertising content, but in 2015 he became fascinated with the promotional content that was screen printed on ashtrays from the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s. This period was before smoking was looked at as being primarily a negative habit, and iconic American businesses, including Howard Johnson’s, International House of Pancakes (iHop) and Holiday Inn, all produced promotional ashtrays printed with their graphic identity. By the time Klein became interested in these objects, the businesses had either ceased to exist, or had changed their logos, and many of their signature buildings, which where examples of classic, “Pop” roadside architecture, has been torn down or repurposed. The artist wanted to connect the glass objects with the business’s sites that were still recognizable and spoke of their history, so he began researching where original buildings still stood. Klein then embarked on a series of road trips to photograph these sites with the intention of combining the photographs with the promotional glass objects. This led him to as far south as Maryland and as far north as upstate New York from his home in Connecticut. In the case of Holiday Inn, it wasn’t their buildings, but their iconic illuminated sign that appeared on ashtrays, so he sought out a standing example of the sign he could photograph. As it turned out all had been removed years before from the hotels' properties and the only working example was indoors at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. He did, however, find out that there was one still standing, surprisingly, in Beruit, Lebanon. He found an image of it on the web and used it to make Holiday Inn (Beruit). In 1973 Holiday Inn changed their tagline from “The Nations Innkeeper” to “The World’s Innkeeper” as they expanded overseas, including the Mideast. For the hotel chain it was bad timing: the disastrous Lebanese civil war began in 1975. In the war, the different Lebanese militias involved in the conflict, including the Nasserites, Christian Phalangists, and the Lebanese National Movement engaged in what came to be called “The Battle of the Hotels” where they each occupied a major high-rise hotel in central Beruit. The Phalangists commanded the Holiday Inn, which they used to fire with both light arms and heavier weapons at the militias in neighboring hotels. Klein used the photo of the heavily damaged Holiday Inn sign as I thought it spoke in a curious, offhanded way about American cultural imperialism in juxtaposition with an ashtray that proclaimed Holiday Inn to be “The World’s Innkeeper.” In the work Holiday Inn (Nocturne) the artist utilized a found, 35mm slide of a Holiday Inn sign at night at an unknown location as the basis of the photograph in the work. Richard Klein is a Connecticut-based artist, independent curator and writer. As an artist, he has exhibited widely, including the Neuberger Museum of Art at SUNY Purchase; Caren Golden Fine Art, New York; the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI; Hales Gallery, London; Gavlak Gallery, Palm Beach, FL; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA; James Barron Art, Kent, CT; The Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA), Portland, OR; Schoolhouse Gallery, Provincetown, MA; Stephan Stoyanov Gallery, NY; Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY; Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, Brattleboro, VT; Ortega y Gasset Projects, Brooklyn, NY; Exhibit by Alberson Tulsa, OK; Incident Report/Flow Chart Foundation, Hudson, NY; ICEHOUSE Project Space, Sharon, CT; Kenise Barnes Fine Art in Kent, CT and with ODETTA Gallery at the Equity Gallery in New York City.. Reviews of his work have appeared in Two Coats of Paint, Whitehot Magazine, The New York Times, Sculpture Magazine, Art in America, and The New Yorker. In the summer of 2024 he will be the first Artist-In-Residence at Peck Ledge Light...

Sculpture made from Swarovski crystals and a found, car-flattened “Pepsi Zero Sugar” soda can by Los Angeles-based artist Sam Keller. The backside is signed and features a D-ring anc...