“It was like a miracle, to be able to hold this unit of spidery lines, as though it were a drawing that had just been picked up by the lines and removed, intact, from the paper.”

—Tom Wesselmann

A significant contributor to the New York Pop Art movement, Tom Wesselmann gained notoriety for his American Nude series, with its bold coloring, striking scale, and graphic form. Far from sticking to a single subject, Wesselmann engaged with various historical genres throughout his career, remaining in careful dialogue with the art historical canon. Wesselmann's thematic interests were not limited to popular culture and consumerism, and his oeuvre may also be read as a modernization of traditional painterly sensibilities.

Metal in nature yet organic in form, Birthday Bouquet is a work that invokes Wesselmann's playful approach, an artist always seeking to surprise and inspire a viewer through the quotidian subject matter. Part of his larger body of floral works, the bright, multicolored flowers of this humble bouquet are not only beautiful, but also signify a radically new exploration of draftsmanship. Existing neither as sculpture nor painting, neither drawing nor relief, this laser-cut steel sculpture calls for a bespoke categorization, wherein the two and three-dimensional spatial planes converge, providing a new tactile quality to the familiar artist's sketch.

“When I got this new metal stuff going, I had never run into anything so heady before... It was the most exciting time of my entire life, these past few years, beginning these steel and aluminum pieces, and then seeing them through to fruition.” 

—Tom Wesselmann

In later years, Wesselmann forged a distinctive artistic path, maturing into a new stage of creativity that extended beyond the codified lexicon of Pop. In this stage of his career, he looked towards earlier artists such as Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Matisse for inspiration. During the 1970s, he began to fully explore the alternative, subtler fields of landscape and still-life, using the foundation of these traditional categories to create new signature techniques and innovative approaches in laser-cut metal. This shift in outlook was partly due to his new country home in upstate New York, his retreat for six months of the year, which became central to his family life and artistic practice. Wesselmann subsequently gave form his love for the natural world in poetry and drawing, exploring quieter, non-figurative themes largely overlooked by his contemporaries. Transplanting these observational studies of flora and fauna as the subject of his most technologically innovative projects in laser metalwork, he successfully rejuvenated such painterly genres as sculptural editions. As one of the earliest proponents of this method, such works exemplify the two core elements of his practice: the continuous role of drawing as a creative starting point and his desire to push the boundaries of any chosen medium.