Pop / Contemporary
About
When it emerged in the 1960s, Pop art was not just about bold colors and celebrity culture; it brought the popular world—from cartoons and advertising to apples and bananas—into the realm of high art, turning taste on its head in the process. In the late 1980s, Jeff Koons, Ashley Bickerton, and a handful of mostly New York-based contemporary artists revived this sensibility, in a movement known informally as “Neo-Pop.” The Pop aesthetic is now wide-spread and global; artists working in this vein combine everything from camp and tchotchkes to luxury and immortal materials. Takashi Murakami’s ebullient flowers or Damien Hirst’s prescription drug-named dots toy with the line between low and high art while not shying away from themes of decadence and death. At times confrontational and provocative, at times irreverent and witty, Pop art—now as then—speaks to the objects and images of our everyday lives. Perhaps Andy Warhol said it most presciently; when asked, in 1961, what Pop art is, he responded: “It’s liking things.”
Artist
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Roy Lichtenstein New York, NY
From his studio in New York City, Roy Lichtenstein did cartoon inspired paintings that helped launch the Pop Art movement. He was unique in that he developed a new visual language in an avant-garde style that was disruptive to viewers and yet was accessible and popular with them. He also... -
Andy Warhol New York, NY
Andy Warhol was an American artist who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, celebrity culture and advertisement that flourished by the 1960s. After a successful career as a commercial illustrator, Warhol became a renowned and...