This is a superb original museum quality ink on paper mounted to board painting by internationally acclaimed Pop Artist CLIVE BARKER (British, b. 1940), dated 1969.

This rare original Pop Art masterpiece is entitled "Morandi" and is a study for the sculpture of the same name in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC. It is signed in pencil by the artist on the front lower right "Clive Barker" and dated "1969". It is titled in pencil on the front lower left "Morandi". It is in excellent condition, measures 23" x 31 ¼" and is framed in its original metal section frame (there is normal age and wear to the frame). Authenticity is GUARANTEED. Winning bidder please add $75.00 packing & shipping within the US. Please view my other auctions and eBay store for additional museum quality fine art and collectibles. 

Clive Barker studied at Luton College of Technology and Art from 1957 but abandoned the course in 1959, working instead on the assembly line of the Vauxhall car factory in Luton for 18 months. The experience of helping to build beautiful, machine-made objects on the shop floor proved decisive on his choice of materials for his first sculptures in 1962: leather and chrome-plated metal. The idea of relying on specialist fabricators to achieve the best result made it easy for him to accept Marcel Duchamp's notion of the ready-made, as applied to ordinary manufactured items designated as sculpture but not made by the artist's own hands. Rather than simply taking things as he found them, however, Barker either commissioned fabricators to make them to his specifications as with his leather-clad Zip Boxes of 1962, which aligned him with Pop art or had the original objects recast or resurfaced so that the sculptures became non-functional surrogates for them. The techniques and materials he employed, the almost heroic elevation of the commonplace, the humorous touches and the acceptance of the banal and the kitsch all contribute to the provocative originality of Barker's work of the 1960s and to its importance in anticipating and probably influencing the sculptures with which Jeff Koons made his name in the mid-1980s. A great admirer of the work of René Magritte, Barker often displayed a Surrealist wit in the transformations he effected, showing the object simultaneously simply as what it is and as a poetic metaphor for something else. Such is the case with one of his most celebrated sculptures, Splash (1967; London, Tate), in which an ordinary household bucket (stripped of its galvanized steel surface and chrome-plated) is filled with ball bearings that seem to be pouring out like water from a metal tap. The play between fluid movement and the stillness of an arrested moment, conceived in part as a response to the painting A Bigger Splash (1967; London, Tate) by his friend David Hockney, brought into question the very nature of sculpture and the kinds of experience that it was able to convey. Unusually receptive to varieties of modern art that looked very different from his own, Barker produced a number of works in honor of painters he admired, such as Morandi Still Life (chrome-plated steel, 1966; Washington, DC, Hirshhorn Museum) and Homage to Soutine (chrome-plated bronze, 1969; Sintra, Mus. A. Mod.), reshaping their typical motifs in terms of found objects: an arrangement of bottles in tribute to the ordered art of Giorgio Morandi, a hanging rabbit (cast from a frozen specimen purchased from a butcher) in front of a shuttered door as his response to the Expressionism of Chaim Soutine. The sleek perfection of Barker's reflective surfaces served to dematerialize the physical attributes of the sculptures and exaggerated their impersonality, their 'hands-off' quality, while paradoxically becoming the most overt signs of his trademark style. In 1978 he produced a notable series of portrait sculptures of his friend Francis Bacon, first making a life mask of the painter's face and then subjecting it to manipulation so that its forms echoed the expressive distortions of Bacon's own treatment of the human figure. In 1987 Barker exhibited a selection of recent oil pastel portraits, many of them depicting artist friends including Allen Jones (1984; London, N.P.G.), but the focus of his later work remained firmly on his cast sculptures and on an imaginative reworking of the still-life tradition. In 1968 he had his first one-man exhibition at the Robert Frazer Gallery, London. He has shown at various exhibitions of British artists in Europe, and also at the exhibition "Pop Art" in 1987 in Japan.