Margaret Roleke

Margaret Roleke, Monochromatic Guns, 2015, monoprint, 22 x 30 in

2018

Margaret Roleke has created the sculpture “Pop,pop” specifically for the Las Gravitas exhibition at ODETTA. The title refers both to the fun and colorful hues of the piece that pop ...

Margaret Roleke's work explores sensationalism, consumerism and the crazy contradictions and relationships that develop when popular culture mixes with war and religion. The Trump presidency has pushed her to be further involved as a political activist and artist. Many new pieces deal with protest and resistance. But the major theme which she has been exploring for several years is gun violence. Using spent shotgun shells and brass, as well as, paper targets in much of her work, from a distance the viewer is not sure what these colorful spent shotgun pieces are. Only upon closer examination does one realize that they are actually made from spent bullets. The environmental plastic waste is also an issue she explores in her work. A percentage of all of Roleke's sales are donated to organizations that work for gun control. Roleke's new silkscreens and cyanotypes deal with the issues of putting families in cages, and the dismantling of the ideas of life, liberty and justice for all...

Roleke creates politically aware work. Her wall reliefs are composed of multitudes of plastic toys, oddly sexualized Disney characters and Happy Meal trinkets. Through investigation ...

Margaret Roleke has created the sculpture “Pop,pop” specifically for the Las Gravitas exhibition at ODETTA. The title refers both to the fun and colorful hues of the piece that pop ...

Margaret Roleke creates politically aware work. Children’s war toys and packaging for these toys have fascinated her and become integrated elements in my wall reliefs and paper piece...

In the body of work for “Child’s Play” Roleke has created diminutive worlds in which toys tell the story of consumption, consumerism, war, and the misuse of power and religion. The m...

"She fled along the avenue" is from the series "Some poems by Jules Laforgue". Patrick Caulfied was deeply inspired by these poems and found to his very own depiction of these poems....

Archival digital print on wove paper. Edition 31/250. Printed by Coriander Press. Published by Chiswick House and Gardens. Signed and numbered by the artist.

Smoking Cigarette #1. Original color etching and soft-ground etching on Arches watercolor paper, 1991. Edition of 65 signed and numbered impressions on Arches paper. Tom Wesselmann is one of the biggest American pop artists today. Even he did not like being labeled a pop artist, it is hard to imagine that his artworks featuring consumer goods and assorted American icons would be considered anything but pop art. At first he was a follower of abstract expressionism, but later switched to figurative art. In the late ‘50s he produced a series of small format collages, which became the basis for his future nudes and still lifes. In 1963 he married Claire Selley, his most faithful model from the series ‘Great American Nude’, and other nudes. In his search for creative styles he began to produce three-dimensional works with the technique of assemblage, using everyday objects such as telephones and televisions. In the ‘Still Life’ series he used advertising techniques and complemented traditional still lifes with mass consumption items taken directly from ads. In the ‘80s he began to work with metals and produced original works with a special laser. Over the next two decades he returned to large formats and the theme of the nude from the ‘60s, rounding off his career with The ‘Sunset Nude’ series, inspired by the works of Matisse. Tom Wesselmann went down in history as one of the greatest representatives of pop art due to his exciting commercial images, his aggressive intervention in three dimensions, his choice of trivial motifs, their monumentalisation, the use of stereotypes as a basis for his work and the choice of strong colors. Wesselmann’s aesthetic usage of everyday objects was done not in criticism of American consumerism and culture, but as a way to render Classical genres modern so as to explore the gap between art and contemporary life. The ‘Smoker Study’ series of works would become one of the most recurrent themes in the 1970s, which he developed throughout the rest of his artistic life. Characterized by the flattening and simplification of everyday subjects, here a single cigarette releases a precise stream of smoke. This burning cigarette on the first sight looks like just a banal representation of an everyday object, but it is more than this. Even cigarettes were one of the major consumer products, which we could previously often seen in different commercials with handsome men and pretty ladies, it also represents an allusion to the lips as an eroticized object...

Flowers. Original silkscreen and hand Watercolor, 1974. Initialed "AW" in pencil lower right and signed on verso in pencil. Edition of 250 signed and numbered impressions on Arches p...

"Before the Mirror" 1975. Signed and numbered PP 4/5 and dated -75. Published by Multiples Inc., and Castelli Graphics, New York. Printed by Styra Studio, New York. Lithograph and screenprint with embossing. L. 89.5 x 63.5 cm, S. 108.5 x 81 cm (BFK Rives). Literature Corlett, Mary Lee. The Prints of Roy Lichtenstein. A Catalogue Raisonné. Published by New York: Hudson Hills...

BANANAS 2023 From “Golden sexy fruits” project CM 86x120x2,8 Print run 1/6+2PA Digital Photography C-Type Lambda print on Fujichrome Photo paper, plexiglass on alluminium compo dbo...