Pop Revisited
Pop Art emerged amidst a proliferation of images in postwar Europe and America. From glossy magazine covers to television advertisements, a new visual language characterised by abundance, aspiration and consumerism captivated a generation of young artists. In 1957, Richard Hamilton described Pop Art as ‘Popular (designed for a mass audience), Transient (short term solution), Expendable (easily forgotten), Low Cost, Mass Produced, Young (aimed at Youth), Witty, Sexy, Gimmicky, Glamorous, Big Business’. More than half a century later, Hamilton’s words remain strikingly relevant. The world that mid-century Pop artists and their contemporaries witnessed and illustrated has not been confined to history, rather it endures, ever more pervasive, in the present-day.
Pop Revisited presents a selection of editions spanning a fifty-year period by artists whose practices played a key role in shaping and expanding the visual culture of the Pop-era. Some found inspiration in the power of celebrity within the cultural zeitgeist, with Hamilton’s I’m dreaming of a black Christmas, 1971 and Is this Che Guevara? , 1969 by Joe Tilson each subverting and destabilising the image of modern icons through colour reversal and abstraction, respectively. Others – such as Patrick Caulfield, with works including Ah! this Life is so everyday, 1973, and Tom Wesselmann with 1964 Radio Edition,1969/1991 – romanticised the banality of day-to-day life, fostering a collective nostalgia for faintly familiar pastimes. Meanwhile, in Claes Oldenburg’s Soft Screw Waterfall, 1976, imagination was unconstrained by convention, elevating the ordinary into the realm of mock heroism.
As images assumed an increasingly prominent role in everyday life, artists began to reconsider the relationship between representation, perception and reality. These concerns resonated beyond Pop Art alone, informing a broader range of postwar artistic practices, including Op Art, in which image-making and visual experience became inextricably linked. For Op artists, the mechanical and biological processes of perception took precedence, as in After Rajasthan, 2013 by Bridget Riley, where contrasting colours and lines create unique viewer experiences.
With its emphasis on tangible and reproducible imagery, Pop Art found a natural ally in printmaking as a formative medium. Through the creation of editions, artists could echo the systems of mass production that generated the wide reach of popular culture. As demonstrated through the practices of artists such as Jasper Johns, who often returned to a select range of images and techniques, repetition and seriality operated as both subject and method. In this way, printmaking offered a conceptual framework through which Pop artists could reflect on a culture defined by the endless reproduction of images.
This cultural landscape now plays out on an unprecedented scale. In an increasingly image-saturated world, where visibility itself has become its own form of currency, the concerns of Pop Art continue to resonate today. Though the means of transmission has broadened, the impulse to consume, recreate and share media remains unwavering. And with this, to revisit Pop is to see contemporary culture anew.
Artists: Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield, Jim Dine, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Allen Jones, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Dieter Roth, Bridget Riley, Joe Tilson, Tom Wesselmann.
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Join us for a tour of Pop Revisited on Friday 7 August at 1pm.
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