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Lithograph on orange-pink handmade paper. Signed and numbered 29/30 by the artist lower left in pencil.
Here Kitaj depicts a sculpture of a nude woman, shaded delicately in black. The woman’s hand reaches to the inside of her thigh, and she stands with her right leg turned out to the side, gazing downward with eyes closed. This print is a sensitively-drawn example of Kitaj’s interest in playful, sensual compositions that were often inspired by art historical references, such as Edward Degas’ late pastel nudes
Kitaj drew on a lithography stone with the edge chipped off, resulting in the image field’s unique shape. Kitaj wrote the word “Sculpture” on the stone, so that the text was reversed on the final print, playing with abstraction and medium. The thick, textured paper recalls the texture of rough marble.
A close friend of fellow Petersburg Press collaborator David Hockney, Kitaj was known as an expressive, superlative draughtsman. Art critic Robert Hughes famously wrote of Kitaj in TIME magazine that “…he draws better than almost anyone else alive.”
