Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular culture such as advertising, news, etc. In Pop art, material is sometimes visually removed from its known context, isolated, and/or combined with unrelated material. The concept of pop art refers not as much to the art itself as to the attitudes that led to it.
Andy Warhol, Campbell's Tomato Juice Box, 1964.
Pop art employs aspects of mass
culture, such as advertising, comic books and mundane cultural objects.
It is widely interpreted as a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of
abstract expressionism, as well as an expansion upon them. And due to
its utilization of found objects and images it is similar to Dada. Pop
art is aimed to employ images of popular as opposed to elitist culture
in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any given culture,
most often through the use of irony.It
is also associated with the artists' use of mechanical means of
reproduction or rendering techniques.The subject matter is far from
traditional "high art" themes of morality, mythology, and classic
history; rather, Pop artists celebrated commonplace objects and people
of everyday life, in this way seeking to elevate popular culture to the
level of fine art. Perhaps owing to the incorporation of commercial
images, Pop art has become one of the most recognizable styles of modern
art.
One of the famous pop art artists is Alex Katz. He is well known for his large paintings, whose bold simplicity and heightened colours are now seen as precursors to Pop Art. His paintings are defined by their flatness of colour and form, their economy of line, and their cool but seductive emotional detachment. A key source of inspiration is the woodcuts produced by Japanese artist Kitagawa Utamaro.
ReplyDeleteBeginning in the late 1950s, he developed a technique of painting on cut panels, first of wood, then aluminum, calling them "cutouts". These works would occupy space like sculptures, but their physicality is compressed into planes, as with paintings. Katz achieved great public prominence in the 1980s.
In 1965, Katz also embarked on a prolific career in printmaking. Katz would go on to produce many editions in lithography, etching, silkscreen, woodcut and linoleum cut, producing over 400 print editions in his lifetime. The Albertina, Vienna, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, hold complete collections of Katz print oeuvre. A print catalogue raisonné is due for release by the Albertina in the fall of 2011.
Katz is represented by Gavin Brown's enterprise in New York, Timothy Taylor Gallery in London, and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris/Salzburg. Before showing with Brown, he had been represented by Pace Gallery for 10 years and by Marlborough Gallery for 30 years.