Pendulum

The motif of the skydiver was one Gerald Laing turned to repeatedly between 1963 and 1964, the years in which he completed his studies at St Martin’s School of Art in London and crossed the Atlantic to commence a new life in New York. This new city not only threw Laing into a network of groundbreaking Pop artists, but also exposed him to the glossy excess of American media and advertising. Whilst spending time in Robert Indiana’s Manhattan studio in 1963, Laing first discovered a photograph of a skydiver in Life magazine. Having first experimented with print media as a main source of inspiration during his student years, he zeroed in on this figure as a symbol of the exhilaration and excitement of a young artist entering a new phase of life. Examples of Laing’s experimentation with the motif are held by the likes of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Tate, London.

The black-and white halftone dots outlining the parachutist parallel Roy Lichtenstein’s contemporaneous Ben-Day-dotted comic-book figures, firmly rooting Laing in the community of Pop artists that were actively re-shaping the art world. Like his peers, consistent experimentation and evolution were key to Laing’s developing career. Later in the 1960s, the artist would delve further into the realm of abstraction, continuing to reference the swaying lines of the unleashed parachute. The present example marks a shift in this abstracted direction; the individual canvases focus our gaze sharply onto the composition’s most basic and crucial elements. As the man dives, arms wide, into the thrilling unknown, the bright orange stripes of his parachute rippling against a vivid blue sky, we are drawn with him into the buzzing world of 1960s New York.