?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
ROBERT MOTHERWELL Oy/Yo.
Color etching and aquatint with paper collage on buff Rives BFK, 1978. 502x397 mm; 19 3/4x15 5/8 inches, full margins. Signed and numbered 21/78 in pencil, lower right. Printed by Robert Bigelow at the artist's studio, Greenwich, with the blind stamp lower right. Published by Brooke Alexander, Inc., New York. A very good impression.
The words "Oy/Yo" are printed in red on the collage element, a piece of hand torn black Ingres paper. The words first appeared in Motherwell's printed oeuvre in 1971 in the livre d'artiste, A la Pintura (see Belknap 97). The word "yo" (Spanish for I) appears twice on the plate. Its reversal is a visual pun on the necessity to write backwards on the plate to have it print forwards. The second time the word is doubly reversed, that is, both the letters and their order are backward, created an additional verbal pun, the Spanish word yo has become the Hebrew oy. Belknap 196.
