Oranges on Fire Screenprint, Mike Mandel / Larry Sultan

$ 500.00

Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel began collaborating as students and continued making work together for almost three decades. Oranges on Fire is taken from a series of billboards that the duo produced in the late 70s. It is available for the first time, as a limited edition 6 colour screen print produced by Stanley / Barker, publisher of Mike Mandel's People in Cars.

'We started with billboards while we were grad students in San Francisco. We sort of banded together because we were from LA, and we were confronting the post-Beat, post-Cafe Society art community where we found ourselves. We were looking for a way to collaborate, and in a naive way we connected on the making of a billboard.

'We recognized the billboard as an advertising medium. It's an instrument used to transmit an ideology of consumerism. And the advertising images on billboards are fairly simple designs since there is so little time, just a few seconds, for the message to be transmitted. With that understanding, we tailored our imagery to fit the medium. We created images that could quickly be perceived, but did not exactly fit the expectation of the advertising message. We designed for an audience that just wasn't quite sure of what they were looking at.

'One of our first billboards was Oranges on Fire (1975). Although the message was enigmatic and had no commercial meaning, we found that people wanted to relate to it as an advertisement. Many viewers thought that it was a “teaser ad”, one that stimulates curiosity by naming an upcoming product without providing any other information.' — Mike Mandel

Details — 6 Color silk screen on 250gsm paper
Size — 841mm x 351mm (about 33" x 14")
Edition of 100 printed in 2017 by Stanley / Barker in the United Kingdom

*Discounts do not apply to artworks.

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Oranges on Fire Screenprint, Mike Mandel / Larry Sultan

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