“It was like a miracle, to be able to hold this unit of spidery lines, as though it were a drawing that had just been picked up by the lines and removed, intact, from the paper” —Tom Wesselmann.
A significant contributor to the New York Pop Art movement, Tom Wesselmann gained notoriety for his American Nude series: incorporating bold coloring, striking scale, and graphic form. However, as exemplified in Delphinium and Daisies, his thematic interests were not limited to popular culture. Rather, throughout his career, he engaged with a multitude of historical genres, seeking a holistic dialogue within the canon of painting.
In later years, Wesselmann forged his own artistic path, maturing into a new stage of creativity that extended beyond the codified lexicon of Pop, which typically depicted the female figure and consumer culture. During the 1970s, he began to fully explore the fields of landscape and still-life painting, using the foundation of these traditional categories to create new signature techniques and creative approaches in laser-cut metal.
This shift in outlook was partly due to his new country home in upstate New York, which became central to his family life and artistic practice as a space he retreated to six months each year. In poetry and drawing, Wesselmann thus burgeoned his love for the natural world, exploring the often overlooked, quieter genres of still life and landscape. Subsequently transplanting these observational studies of flora and fauna as the subject of his most technologically innovative projects in metalwork with the laser, he successfully rejuvenated and advanced such genres. As one of the earliest proponents of this method, such works exemplify the two core elements of his practice: the continuous role of drawing as a creative starting point and his desire to push the boundaries of any chosen medium.
Metal in nature yet organic in form, Delphinium and Daisies is a work that invokes Wesselmann's playful approach, an artist always seeking to surprise and inspire a viewer through quotidian subject matter. The delicate, bright blue flowers of this humble country bouquet are both beautiful and signify a radical new exploration of draftsmanship. Existing neither as sculpture nor painting, neither drawing nor relief, this laser-cut steel sculpture calls for a bespoke categorization, wherein the two and three-dimensional spatial planes converge, providing a new tactile quality to the familiar artist's 'sketch.'