Gerald Laing has produced several portfolios of limited edition prints during his working life. The best kown of these are the 1968 Pop prints which consist of three portfolios and one single print which are entitled:
BRIGITTE BARDOT (BB) Single image, 24”x36”, Edition of 200
BABY BABY WILD THINGS (Starlets) Five images, 36”x24”, in a portfolio of pink flocked card with blue velvet ties. Edition of 200.
PARACHUTES (Skydivers) Six images, 36”x24”, Edition of 75.
Gerald Laing printed these editions personally in his loft on Greene Street in downtown Manhattan in 1968 in the area now known as Soho. All of the images are taken from the paintings of his Pop period, which lasted only from 1962-1965. These were paintings of commercially reproduced images such as newspaper andmagazine pictures, rather than of objective reality. The monchrome dotted areas which refer to the Ben-Day dot system of printing were painted in oil paint on canvas on a ruled pencil grid at a set interval. The flat coloured areas were intended to refer to simple and crude printing processes. These joyful and naively optimistic images were a welcome alternative to the grim decay and worn out condition of Britain in the post war period, and were considered to be a type of contemporary icon. In “Pop Impressions Europe/USA: Prints and Multiples from the Museum of Modern Art, New York 1999” Gerald Laing wrote “(They were) ...appearing around us... after the peeling stucco of wartime neglect. I was transfixed by the crude but powerful printing process used in the poster advertisements... the dots and lines and cacophony of form and colour visible at short range, and the reassuring integrity of the image at a distance.”
The pleasant paradox of the Pop prints is that they are in fact prints of photographs of paintings of prints of photographs, and they employ a refined version of one aspect of their original subject matter as their own means of reproduction.
Gerald Laing’s then dealer in New York, Richard Feigen, bought all of the portfolios outright in 1968 to market in his subsidiary which was called Richard Feigen Graphics. This enterprise lasted only about three years, after which period Feigen ceased to deal in contemporary art and the unsold balance of the Pop prints were put into storage, where they remained for some twenty five years.
Gerald Laing then bought them back from Feigen and is now able to offer for sale these particularly fine and very popular images, most of which are in pristine condition, having not been handled since the day they were printed.
To purchase these prints, please contact the artist at: kinkell@btinternet.com