Standing Nude (Variation No. 7)

This Standing Nude is an example of a significant aspect of the American Pop artist Wesselmann’s oeuvre, his steel drawings, which took his art in a new direction in the early 1980s at a time before any artist had used the technique of laser cutting. In fact, those drawings are among Wesselmann’s most outstanding contributions to the history of art, and the steel-cutting technique he developed has become so identified with him that virtually no one since has ventured to use it.


Dating from 1985, it was the third steel drawing to be executed by Wesselmann. Ten different “variations” of the work were produced, six of them painted in colour and four in black alone. It should be noted that each variation is unique, as the artist painted them individually, and the colours vary from one to the other.