Op Art
OP ART STYLE
The Op art movement emerged in the 1960s, mirroring the counterculture of the time in its embrace of visual trickery, graphic shapes and bright colors.
Spreading across Europe and the Americas, the style — whose name is short for “optical art” — influenced advertising, fashion and interior design before fading in the early ’70s.
Op art remained significant, however, for artists and scientists interested in the nature of perception. And today, it’s seeing a resurgence of interest from collectors and interior designers.
Op artists played with the principles of perception, manipulating line, shape, patterns and color to create the illusion of depth and movement. They drew on and evolved methods developed by past movements, from Impressionism to Abstract Expressionism, to produce intense visual experiences.
All the Op artists shared a focus on the gap between what is and what we perceive. Each, however, had a distinct approach to the issue and a unique visual style.
On 1stDibs, find a collection of Op art that includes works by Josef Albers, Bridget Riley, Jesús Rafael Soto and more.
to
3
14
2
11
9
4
1
1
8
4
1
Overall Height
to
Overall Width
to
5
14
13
1
21
159
86
47
43
9
4
4
4
4
Style: Op Art
Artist: David Roth
Untitled 25, Abstract Op Art Screenprint by David Roth
By David Roth
Located in Long Island City, NY
Luminous Op Art print by David Roth. Nicely matted and framed in black.
Untitled 25
David Roth, American (1942)
Date: 1979
Screenprint, signed and numbered in pencil
Edition of 150
...
Category
1970s Op Art
Materials
Screen
Untitled 23, Abstract Op Art Screenprint by David Roth
By David Roth
Located in Long Island City, NY
Luminous Op Art print by David Roth. Nicely matted and framed in black.
Untitled 23
David Roth, American (1942)
Date: 1979
Screenprint, signed and numbere...
Category
1970s Op Art
Materials
Screen
Op Art, Kinetic 1970s Original Vintage Silkscreen Lithograph Print
By David Roth
Located in Surfside, FL
Hand signed and numbered limited edition print.
David Roth studied at the Illinois Institute of Technology's Institute of Design and was twice the recipient of the Moholy-Nagy Scholarship in visual design. It was Roth's initial work as a designer at fine art for commercial use that brought him interesting positions as art director for Lanvin, Charles at the Ritz, and Germain Monteil.
. The strings are tied in bunches and closely hung tram a wooden bar. The size and shape of the string is similar to that at a canvas painting. Each bundle is represented by a vertical row at squares on the graph and the groupings at string are lined up along the wall according to the horizontal rows at the program. The six primary and secondary colors are used in their full intensity along with black, grey, and white.
As a painter Roth works to formulate with color. Some painters regard color as a concomitant of form, hence a subordinate, but Roth's color is the chief medium of his pictorial language. A programmed juxtaposition at primary color allows Roth and the viewer to play upon various combinations. The graphs Roth executes are proportioned according to a strict mathematical formula - the pictures are
Composed according to horizontal and vertical divisions on the graph paper. The optical quality of color, deliberately sought, has its roots in the Bauhaus investigations of illusion, and thus has a direct relationship to the Op art produced in postwar Europe. Roth has arranged his hues so as to persuade the planes to separate from the ground on which they are planted, and float free in space. It is almost as if Roth is giving us a "readout" on his creative process. Although the graphs appear to vary in their use of color the same colors are used throughout, also the same amount of color. Roth's work illustrates the sophistication of the human eye-brain relationship that has developed and invites the viewer to participate in the evolution at visionary ideas.
One Man Shows
1966 The Gallery Upstairs, Buffalo, New York
1967 The Gallery Upstairs, Buffalo, New York
1969 The House of Graphics, New York
1969 Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, Illinois
1972 Robert Elkon Gallery, New York
1973 Robert Elkon Gallery, New York
1974 Robert Elkon Gallery, New York
1975 Michael Wyman Gallery, Chicago
1975 Robert Elkon Gallery, New York
1976 G.W. Einstein, New York
1976 Robert Elkon Gallery, New York
1977 Robert Elkon Gallery, New York
1977 G.W. Einstein, New York
1978 Sunne Savage Gallery, Boston, Massachusetts
1978 Robert Elkon Gallery, New York
1979 Nancy Roth Gallery, Katonah, New York
Group Exhibitions
1967 State University of New York, Buffalo
1970 Ronald Feldman Gallery
1970 The Everyman Gallery
1971 Robert Elkon Gallery, New York
1972 The Brooklyn Museum, New York
1972 The Newark Museum, New Jersey
1972 Art...
Category
1970s Op Art
Materials
Screen
David Roth, Abstract Screenprint, 1979
By David Roth
Located in Long Island City, NY
This screenprint was created by American artist David Roth. Roth's images are proportioned according to a strict mathematical formula - the pictures are composed according to horizon...
Category
1970s Op Art
Materials
Screen
David Roth, Abstract Screenprint, 1979
By David Roth
Located in Long Island City, NY
This screenprint was created by American artist David Roth. Roth's images are proportioned according to a strict mathematical formula - the pictures are composed according to horizon...
Category
1970s Op Art
Materials
Screen
Untitled VI, Acrylic Painting on Paper by David Roth
By David Roth
Located in Long Island City, NY
Artist: David Roth, American (1942 - )
Title: Untitled VI
Year: 1974
Medium: Acrylic Painting on Arches Paper, signed and dated
Image Size: 15.5 x 45.5 inches
Size: 22.5 in. x 53.5 i...
Category
1970s Op Art
Materials
Acrylic
David Roth, Abstract Drawing, 1977
By David Roth
Located in Long Island City, NY
This colored pencil drawing was created by American artist David Roth. Roth's images are proportioned according to a strict mathematical formula - the pictures are composed according...
Category
1970s Op Art
Materials
Paper, Color Pencil
David Roth, Abstract Serigraph, 1980
By David Roth
Located in Long Island City, NY
This screenprint was created by American artist David Roth. Roth's images are proportioned according to a strict mathematical formula - the pictures are composed according to horizon...
Category
1980s Op Art
Materials
Screen
David Roth, Abstract Screenprint, 1977
By David Roth
Located in Long Island City, NY
This screenprint was created by American artist David Roth. Roth's images are proportioned according to a strict mathematical formula - the pictures are composed according to horizon...
Category
1970s Op Art
Materials
Screen
David Roth, Abstract Screenprint, 1979
By David Roth
Located in Long Island City, NY
This screenprint was created by American artist David Roth. Roth's images are proportioned according to a strict mathematical formula - the pictures are composed according to horizon...
Category
1970s Op Art
Materials
Screen
David Roth, Abstract Screenprint, 1979
By David Roth
Located in Long Island City, NY
This screenprint was created by American artist David Roth. Roth's images are proportioned according to a strict mathematical formula - the pictures are composed according to horizon...
Category
1970s Op Art
Materials
Screen
David Roth, Abstract Painting on Graph Paper, 1971
By David Roth
Located in Long Island City, NY
This acrylic painting was created by American artist David Roth. Roth's images are proportioned according to a strict mathematical formula - the pictures are composed according to horizontal and vertical divisions on the graph paper...
Category
1970s Op Art
Materials
Paper, Acrylic
David Roth, Abstract Painting on Graph Paper, 1970
By David Roth
Located in Long Island City, NY
This painting was created by American artist David Roth. Roth's images are proportioned according to a strict mathematical formula - the pictures are composed according to horizontal and vertical divisions on the graph paper...
Category
1970s Op Art
Materials
Paper, Acrylic
David Roth, Abstract Painting, 1977
By David Roth
Located in Long Island City, NY
This acrylic painting was created by American artist David Roth. Roth's images are proportioned according to a strict mathematical formula - the pictures are composed according to ho...
Category
1970s Op Art
Materials
Paper, Acrylic
Related Items
Thread
By Ed Touchette
Located in Gloucester, MA
Ed Touchette (b. 1948) is inspired by a love of architecture and public spaces to make paintings which express joyful wonder at our built environment — ol...
Category
2010s Op Art
Materials
Ink, Acrylic, Watercolor
Untitled
By Sol LeWitt
Located in Ljubljana, SI
Original color silkscreen, 1998. Edition of 108 signed and numbered impressions on Arches paper.
Sol LeWitt was a well-known American Conceptual and Minimal artist. He is famous for ...
Category
1990s Op Art
Materials
Screen
"Untitled" Acrylics, Pencils, Oil Pastels on Paper in Neutral Hues of Taupe
Located in New York, NY
"Untitled" 2019, 25" x 31" horizontal drawing on paper by Argentine-born artist Karina Gentinetta (featured in Elle Decor, the New York Times, Tradi...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Op Art
Materials
Glaze, Oil Pastel, Acrylic, Carbon Pencil
"Frozen Tracks in Snow", contemporary abstract landscape acrylic & crayon, paper
By Mel Reese
Located in Brooklyn, NY
An acrylic and caran d'ache abstract drawing of the moment in the season when it is so crips and quiet that your shoes make clear tracks frozen in the snow.
This drawing was produce...
Category
2010s Op Art
Materials
Oil Crayon, Acrylic, Archival Paper
Untitled
Located in Ljubljana, SI
Untitled. Original color silkscreen, cca. 1980. Edition of 200 signed and numbered impressions on Arches paper.
Victor Vasarely was a French painter of Hungarian origin. Influenced b...
Category
Late 20th Century Op Art
Materials
Screen
Victor Vasarely Screen Print Abstract, Geometric Squares Cubes Hexagon
Located in Detroit, MI
Victor Vasarely born in 1906 was a Hungarian-French artist, who is widely accepted as a "grandfather" and leader of the Op Art movement. Op Art is a form of abstract art that gives the illusion of movement by the precise use of pattern and color, or in which conflicting patterns emerge and overlap. Victor Vasarely and Brigit Riley are its most famous exponents. In its visual balancing act of color and movement from a flat plane to developed continuous flow “Untitled” is a complex arrangement of squares and colors that visually expand and contract. It is one of Vasarely’s most successful Op Art abstract works. The piece is signed on the lower right and number 20/150 on the lower left. The print is behind glass and matted.
Vasarely was born in Pecs and grew up in Slovakia and Budapest, where in 1925, he took up medical studies. Abandoning medicine he turned to traditional academic painting at the private Podolini-Volkmann Academy. In 1928/1929, he enrolled at Sandor Bortnyik’s private art school widely recognized as Budapest's centre of Bauhaus studies. His studies concentrated on applied graphic art and typographical design. In 1929, he painted his Blue Study and Green Study. In 1930, he married his fellow student Claire Spinner (1908–1990). Together they had two sons, Andre and Jean-Pierre. Vasarely became a graphic designer and a poster artist during the 1930s combining patterns and organic images with each other.
Vasarely utilized geometric shapes and colorful graphics, the artist created compelling illusions of spatial depth, as seen in his work Vega-Nor (1969). Vasarely’s method of painting borrowed from a range of influences, including Bauhaus design principles, Wassily Kandinsky, and Constructivism. In the late 1920s, Vasarely enrolled at the Muhely Academy in Budapest, where the syllabus was largely based on Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus school in Germany.
After settling in Paris in 1930, Vasarely worked in advertising agencies to support himself as a graphic artist while creating many works including Zebra (1937), which is considered by some to be one of the earliest examples of Op Art. The artist experimented in a style based in Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism during the 1940s, before arriving at his hallmark checkerboard...
Category
Mid-20th Century Op Art
Materials
Paper, Screen
Infinity #54 (op art curvy monochrome red pen drawing wood detailed oriental)
By Cheolyu Kim
Located in Quebec, Quebec
Cheoluy Kim’s practice examines the blurred frontier between perceived reality and fantasy. His work is informed by a childhood growing up on the border of North and South Korea in Gosung. There, he grew fascinated by all the fauna and flora he observed from his village surrounded by mountains, as well as the air balloons carrying political propaganda. He witnessed everything in the sky. This instilled a deeply rooted reflex to imagine a fantastical world beyond the physical frontiers he was bound by.
Cheolyu Kim studied and obtained his master in sculpture, although, his current practice is entirely devoted to pen drawing on either paper or wood. Either bicolored or monochrome, the artist's typically limited chromatic palette gives room for an intense focus on detailed compositions, tonal gradients, and multiple perspectives.
Kim’s background in sculpture is evident in the carved-like volumes of the elements in his drawings. Fine moire and cross-hatching are used for textures and shading in the drawn sections while the paper or wood is left fully exposed in other areas.
Imaginary fauna and flora abound which contributes to a rather biomorphic aura to his work. All the while, indigenous, modern and futuristic architectural structures are erected and confuse any sense of fixed temporality. Rather, it projects us into a phantasmagorical universe where past, present and future collapse into one. Some perspectives are even skewed disrupting our contemplation. Totemic poles, origami-shaped creatures, and aquatic vegetation coexist fluidly in Kim’s oniric visions. His fine-detailed patterned dreamscapes engage the viewer actively; we are called upon to discover how do all the various entities interact over the multiple receding planes building up to Cheolyu's surrealist ecosystems.
keywords; wood, pencil, rings, circles, moire, highly detailed, geometric abstraction, intentionally exposed support, line form and color, monochrome, curvilinear forms, Korean art, dynamism, contemporary minimalism, graphism, repetition, engaged with traditional Korean art...
Category
2010s Op Art
Materials
Birch, Wood Panel, Pen
Oscillation
By Roy Ahlgren
Located in Fairlawn, OH
11 color screen print
Signed, dated, titled and numberedin pencil
Edition: 150 (9/150)
Provenance:
Estate of the Artist
By Decent
Category
1980s Op Art
Materials
Screen
Agam Original Marker Drawing Colorful Spirals Hand Signed Israeli Kinetic Op Art
By Yaacov Agam
Located in Surfside, FL
Yaacov Agam, Israeli (b. 1928)
Hand signed and dated
This is a great example of bold, graphic, mod design. Along with Reuven Rubin and Menashe Kadishman he is among Israel's best kn...
Category
1990s Op Art
Materials
Archival Paper, Permanent Marker
Mito
By Alex Corno
Located in Milano, IT
Mito
2015
Collage e acrilico su carta
CM 70x50
Con la mano e con fuoco, sul metallo. Con la mano e col pensiero sulla carta.
Il disegno è inscindibile dalla scultura e non può esse...
Category
2010s Op Art
Materials
Glue, Mixed Media, Acrylic, Paper
"Snow Fence", contemporary abstract winter landscape, acrylic & spray on paper
By Mel Reese
Located in Brooklyn, NY
An acrylic and spray paint abstract drawing of that moment when the snow has just fallen and sticks to the colorful picket fences within town. Fresh and fluffy.
This drawing was pro...
Category
2010s Op Art
Materials
Spray Paint, Acrylic, Archival Paper
Chiapas I
Located in Ljubljana, SI
Chiapas I. Original color silkscreen, cca. 1970. Edition of 70 signed and numbered impressions on Arches paper.
Marko Spalatin was a modern and contemporary artist from Croatia, who ...
Category
1970s Op Art
Materials
Screen
Previously Available Items
Op Art, Kinetic 1970s Original Vintage Silkscreen Lithograph Print
By David Roth
Located in Surfside, FL
Hand signed and numbered limited edition print.
David Roth studied at the Illinois Institute of Technology's Institute of Design and was twice the recipient of the Moholy-Nagy Schol...
Category
1970s Op Art
Materials
Screen
David Roth, Abstract Screenprint, 1979
By David Roth
Located in Long Island City, NY
This screenprint was created by American artist David Roth. Roth's images are proportioned according to a strict mathematical formula - the pictures are composed according to horizon...
Category
1970s Op Art
Materials
Screen
David Roth, Abstract Screenprint, 1980
By David Roth
Located in Long Island City, NY
This screenprint was created by American artist David Roth. Roth's images are proportioned according to a strict mathematical formula - the pictures are composed according to horizon...
Category
1980s Op Art
Materials
Screen
Op Art art for sale on 1stDibs.
Find a wide variety of authentic Op art available for sale on 1stDibs. Works in this style were very popular during the 21st Century and Contemporary, but contemporary artists have continued to produce works inspired by this movement. If you’re looking to add art created in this style to introduce contrast in an otherwise neutral space in your home, the works available on 1stDibs include elements of blue, purple, orange, red and other colors. Many Pop art paintings were created by popular artists on 1stDibs, including Victor Vasarely, Roy Ahlgren, Victor Debach, and Yaacov Agam. Frequently made by artists working with Screen Print, and Paint and other materials, all of these pieces for sale are unique and have attracted attention over the years. Not every interior allows for large Op Art, so small editions measuring 2 inches across are also available. Prices for art made by famous or emerging artists can differ depending on medium, time period and other attributes. On 1stDibs, the price for these items starts at $66 and tops out at $350,000, while the average work sells for $1,616.
Recently Viewed
View AllMore Ways To Browse
Neon Yellow
French Painted Poster
Oil Painting 19th Century Man
Oil Painting Man 19th Century
Old Man Figure
Flower Hat
The Big Five
Distressed Paper
Antique Oil On Canvas In Gilt Frame
Wood Female Figure
Porter Vintage
Drew Gold
Vintage Air Force
Italian Late 19th Century Oil
Twenty Seven
Large 1906
Vintage Mid Century Oil On Canvas Painting
Stone Horse