Patrick Nagel has long deserved his place as one of the greatest artists from the beginning of
the ‘80s, a period when Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Tom Wesselmann and Andy Warhol
set the artistic landscape. And while the name Patrick Nagel is lesser known, the images that he created between the end of the 1970’s up to the mid-1980’s have been imprinted upon our collective memory, and he may rightly be counted as one of the most influential artists of this period.

The purity that we find in his works and his manner of being able to transmit the power of his model in a minimum of the most important lines, provide for the unique and iconic style of which Nagel is the pioneer.The typical cut of the hair, skin of porcelain white, sharp jaw lines, heavy eye- liner, bright red lips and the fixed stare give us a perfect image of the self-assured and free-spirited woman of the early ‘80s.

Nagel dies very young, at age 38, on February 4th 1984.The anticipated exhibitions in Paris, Germany and Australia were thus annulled. In the meantime, over two-million posters of his works had been distributed, something no other artist could claim to equal. His few exhibitions with unique works on canvas and board were sold-out in a matter of minutes, and given his early passing and the fact that there exist only a mere hundred or so works on canvas along with a relatively small number of works on board, these will always remain of great rarity on the art market.

The 1990’s and following years saw the work of Patrick Nagel wane owing to a market lacking transparency and control, with a multitude of copies and copy-cats. But for several years now this artist and his visual language – since become iconic – have at last received deserved recognition, cementing Nagel’s noteworthy position in the art history of the 1980’s.