Sale of the week: Peter Blake – 60 Years of Printmaking
Sat, 31 Jul 2010 00:34:10 +0100
Sale: Peter Blake: 60 Years of PrintmakingLocation: Christie's, 85 Old Brompton Road, London SW7. Tel: +44 (0) 20 7930 6074Date: Until August 12. Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm; Saturday and Sunday 10am-4pmNeed to know: Sir Peter Blake may have turned 78 last month but his position as the king of British pop art is undiminished. His paintings that look like collages and collages that look like paintings are known the world over, and his celebrated 1967 design for the cover of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album has achieved iconic status (he earned a paltry £200 for it). Despite four decades since his first solo exhibition, Blake's imagination remains as bright as the pictures he creates from the cut-outs, photographs, odd objects and ephemera that litter his west London studio. Since 2001 he has wholeheartedly embraced digital printing technology to produce works that are remarkable in their realism and he remains as prolific as ever in his artistic endeavours, tirelessly designing carpets, shopping bags, CD sleeves and more. Highlights: With original Blake works now fetching six-figure sums, attention is turning to the prints he has been making since his late teens. This comprehensive and wonderfully psychedelic selling exhibition features more than 150 signed and numbered images ranging in price from £500-£25,000. All printmaking techniques are here, from woodcut to etching and lithography to screen print, as well as more recent digital methods. Notable is a set of eight Alice in Wonderland silkscreen images from 1972 priced at £12,000, a folio of 10 "Love" prints (£10,575) and, from 2009, "Some of the Sources of Pop Art 7", a montage of 25 equal-sized square images ranging from a Brillo box to a portrait of Elvis. A silkscreen print on paper enhanced with glazes, glitter and diamond dust, the work is available in an edition of 175, each priced at £5,000.