Acquavella Galleries is pleased to announce Painted Pop, an exhibition featuring painted works by key figures of the American Pop movement. The exhibition includes important works by featured artists including Rosalyn Drexler, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, James Rosenquist, Ed Ruscha, George Segal, Marjorie Strider, Wayne Thiebaud, Andy Warhol, and Tom Wesselmann. Painted Pop is on view October 9–December 15, 2023 at Acquavella’s New York location.
Defined by its infusion of imagery from mass media and the American zeitgeist, Pop Art rose to prominence in America in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The period is documented for its innovative techniques and sensibilities that appealed to heightened interests of mechanical reproduction. However, despite the adoption of the visual language of mass culture and consumerism, from newspaper articles to magazine and billboard advertisements, Pop artists continued to foreground the medium of painting in their practices.
“While shattering the norms of what was considered acceptable subject matter, these artists were skilled, academically trained painters with strong visual vocabularies that they extended by experimenting not only with novel techniques but also with newly marketed paint products such as Magna, Liquitex, and acrylic.”
Gallery Director Michael Findlay
The artists that would come to define Pop Art chose consistently to represent banal objects and figures; this included the constant inundation of imagery from the media, numbing viewers into the burgeoning consumerist era. Andy Warhol’s Death and Disasters series is emblematic of this. Borrowing photo-journalistic images of car crashes, electric chairs and suicides, Warhol utilized high-grain silkscreens—against an overlay of solid color—to navigate the anesthetizing effects of the media’s repetitive fixation on tragedy and violence. In Five Deaths on Turquoise (1963), a car crash of five teenagers is blown up and reproduced in Warhol’s characteristic style; an image Warhol would revisit 20 more times in 1963. The artist’s continuing interest and repetition of the subject matter became a method through which he explored transience and mortality, commenting on the public’s appetite for sensational news.
In Painted Pop, the exhibited works often co-opt the plasticity of mass-produced imagery, yet their process alludes to the artist’s physical intervention. In Warhol’s Coke Bottle (1962), thick black outlines produced by silkscreen hold an inky quality, seeping into the green acrylic ink upon the surface of the canvas. A blue ballpoint outline below the paint is unique to this object, indicating that the green paint was applied entirely by hand, without the guidance of a preliminary screen. While the painting refers to the cultural ubiquity of Coca-Cola, it conspicuously gestures to the individual experience of consumption. This contrast between individual versus collective and repetition versus singularity continued to interest artists well after Pop Art’s initial popularity.
Pop Art aesthetics were intertwined with commercial advertising, as were many of the associated artist’s early careers: Ed Ruscha (b. 1937) took a job as a layout artist for the Carson-Roberts Advertising Agency; Andy Warhol (1928–1987) was a commercial illustrator; James Rosenquist (1933–2017) worked as a billboard painter; and Wayne Thiebaud (1920–1921) created movie posters, advertisements, and cartoons. Drawing from these experiences, artists appropriated their subjects from product packaging, Hollywood movies, comic books—anything that was universally distributed. Both critiquing consumerism and working within it, Pop Art transformed mundane, everyday imagery into fine art. Wayne Thiebaud’s Mickey Mouse (1988) encapsulates this dichotomy between commercial and art, critique and praise. The iconic cartoon character is depicted in Thiebaud’s unique color-forward approach, transforming the figure into a subject of dramatic simplicity.
Perhaps most characteristic of the style that arose to become “Pop Art” was the blurring of the lines between “high” and “low” art. Pop artists established a relatively groundbreaking concept that art could borrow from any source, whether that was Campbell’s soup cans, cartoons, or even Claude Monet’s Haystacks (1890–91), which was of particular interest to artist Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997). In Lichtenstein’s Haystacks (1968 & 1969), the classic Monet series is represented as if produced by a printing press; Lichtenstein emulated the Ben-Day dots process of large-scale printing, constructing his images out of small, colored, hand-painted dots. Pop artists such as James Rosenquist and Lichtenstein sought to upend art history’s obsession with originality and enlightened subjects by replacing them with the ever growing consumerist and media dominated visual reality of mid-century America. Relishing this challenge, Lichtenstein’s crisp, stencil-like pictures formed a stark contrast with the unique painterly creations of his predecessors. The duality of Pop Art is represented here in an amalgamation of high and low, deconstructing previous hierarchies of culture.
The exhibition is accompanied by a digital catalogue with supplemental materials and commentary, as well as a special panel discussion with Acquavella’s Michael Findlay; Bob Colacello, writer and biographer, regular contributor to Vanity Fair and author of Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up, a memoir on working closely with Warhol in the 1970s and early 1980s; and Sarah C. Bancroft, curator, historian, and Executive Director of the James Rosenquist Foundation on November 8, 2023.
