Galérie Michael Serigraph 1982

This serigraph by Patrick Nagel presents a woman who is cool and inscrutable. I love the way he’s used flat planes of colour - purples, greys, and blacks - to create geometric shapes around her face. I wonder, what was it like to make this artwork? He must have been so precise, carefully aligning each screen to build up the image, layer by layer. Nagel's choice of smooth surfaces and defined edges gives this work a clean, almost industrial feel. Her lips are a deep, glossy red - the focal point, drawing you in, but her expression is unreadable, as though she is withholding something. He clearly owes a debt to the graphic style of Japanese woodblock prints, but he's also pushing that style toward something utterly contemporary. In a way, it's like he's taking ancient techniques and updating them for the slick, modern world of 1980s advertising and graphic design. Artists are always doing that: having conversations with each other, across time and place. Isn’t that awesome?