A MATTER OF INFLUENCE.

Pop Art emerged in Britain in the mid-1950s, followed by America at the decade’s end. Borrowing considerably from American pop culture and appropriating the visual imagery adopted to fuel the American Dream, artists incorporated colourful images and icons from mass media and product advertisements into their work, making art that was relatable and inclusive of contemporary society.

At the beginning of the decade the Independent Group, a group of artists, writers, and critics interested in the relationship between fine art and pop culture, resolved to create in opposition to the elitism of the traditional art world and their fastidious approach to art and culture. Pop Art was born out of this movement as young British artists motivated by the philosophies of the Independent Group felt that the art shown in museums and commercial galleries had no relationship to them or their lives.

Across the water, Abstract Expressionism dominated the art world for close to 2 decades. Their massive canvas’ filled with profoundly personal expression were inaccessible to the average viewer and unrelatable to young artists who, in accordance with the British, were strongly opposed to the elitism of the movement. Despite critical outrage from the art establishment, young artists embraced the shifting attitudes and harnessed the newly emerging visual landscape. Adopting the new vernacular that celebrated and critiqued the banality of commonplace objects rooted in the real world, they initiated a significant departure from the constraints of the traditional art world whilst elevating the everyday to the level of fine art.

This break from tradition went beyond the co-opting and remixing of mass-produced elements from advertisements, product design, celebrity culture, comic books and the like, to the use of commercial techniques.

Techniques such as screen printing, multiples, downplaying the artist’s hand, the implementation of physical elements or “readymades”, which blurred the distinction between sculpture and painting and the reinterpretation of text into poetic prose and subject matter. As intended, this further disruption has permanently broken down the canonical distinction between art and design, high and low, and mass production and individual creation that has been in place for centuries.

Pop art found its stride in the United States in the 1960s. By this time the ugliness of consumerism and feelings of discontent against established societal norms were setting in, the Vietnam War incited mass protests, the Civil Rights Movement fought for equality, and the women’s liberation movement was gaining momentum. While making art that was relatable and inclusive of contemporary society, pop artists subtly underscored their work with satire and irony to expose the dark side of the American dream, the seduction of celebrity and mass media and the capacity they held to manipulate and influence American culture, lifestyle and conventional values. Warhol’s silkscreen portraits of celebrities and coke bottles were taken from recognizable images which were often repeated as both a celebration and a critique of the impact of celebrity and consumer culture. Placing these images in a new context or unconventional setting allowed the viewer to see them from a different perspective.

For Pop artists, anything could be art, from Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines where everyday objects were a physical component of the work to Warhol’s Brillo Boxes and Campbell’s Soup Cans. Today the movement is so deeply ingrained into our contemporary culture that it is no longer merely a reflection of it. Pop Art’s playful spirit survives and its legacy and themes of appropriation, repetition, sampling from mass media, celebrity culture, use of banal objects and mechanical processes are all common practices for artists working today. The legacy of Pop Art lives on, touching all spheres of life. It is a limitless source of inspiration and it is simply A MATTER OF INFLUENCE.

Andy Warhol changed the way in which we look at the world and the way the world looks at art. With his exhaustive observation of cultural trends, from his rise to Pop art fame in the early 1960s up until his death in 1987, he identified the images and aesthetics shaping the consumer-driven postwar American experience, and transformed what he saw into a sophisticated yet accessible body of work. He invented new ways of image making, vastly expanding what was considered fine art, and also a new kind of artist, one who merged art and life, and treated painting, photography, filmmaking, writing, publishing, advertising, branding, performance, video, television, digital media and even his own persona as equally valid terrain for creative experimentation. Often lost in his personal celebrity and myth is the fact that he is widely considered one of the most important post-war artists of the 20th century. (Excerpted from Warhol Foundation)

In his Marilyn portraits, which he began shortly after her death in 1962, Warhol immortalized the actress, sex symbol, and innocent ingenue masking the tragic reality of his subject. He selected a publicity photo from the film Niagra (1953) which he cropped closely representing the glamourous surface of the woman we thought we knew, while paradoxically obscuring the reality of her tragic personal life and the Hollywood “product” she had become.

In August '62 I started doing silkscreens. I wanted something stronger that gave more of an assembly line effect. With silkscreening you pick a photograph, blow it up, transfer it in glue onto silk, and then roll ink across it so the ink goes through the silk but not through the glue. That way you get the same image, slightly different each time. It was all so simple quick and chancy. I was thrilled with it. When Marilyn Monroe happened to die that month, I got the idea to make screens of her beautiful face the first Marilyns.
Andy Warhol

In his boldly coloured, graphic works—including paintings, drawings, and prints—Jonas Wood combines cultural references with images of the objects, interiors, and people that comprise the fabric of his life. Translating the three-dimensional world around him into flat colour and line, he confounds expectations of scale and vantage point.

His work reflects an instantly recognizable vision of the contemporary world probing the boundary between the new and the familiar.

Damien Hirst gained prominence and notoriety by making visionary work that was not only shocking but replete with conceptual depth. Since emerging onto the international art scene with his YBA cohorts, Hirst continues to be genre-defying in his examination of oppositional relationships between art and commerce, religion and science, and life and death. Existing outside of the status quo and not one to create work behind the commercial times it is no surprise to see Hirst producing NFTs. Perhaps you remember Drake sharing the Damien Hirst designed cover for his latest album, Certified Lover Boy, back in August. For a few days, the internet was united in mocking the design — a grid of 12 pregnant woman emojis with different skin tones. Now, though, Hirst has doubled down on the cover image, turning it into a series of NFT’s entitled Great Expectations.

Jack Kenna’s practice extends fluidly across painting and sculpture, often incorporating found images, objects, and text. Drawing partially from his material surroundings, his compositions are highly considered and incorporate unconventional juxtapositions, uncanny backgrounds and close-up cropping of objects of subjective and sentimental value. Kenna also makes great use of the extensive cache of online imagery to develop a vocabulary of motifs that are constantly appearing, morphing, and reappearing in his practice.

Daniele Buetti is a contemporary Swiss artist with a multi-media practice focused on exposing the fragility of popular culture and the excesses of today’s consumer driven society. Interested in exposing and analyzing the gap between appearance and reality, Buetti attempts to reveal what lies beneath the glossy surface of the beauty, sports and fashion worlds. In Looking for Love, a series from the late 1990’s, Buetti draws brand names, logos, and scribbles onto the backs of reproduced images taken from fashion magazines.

The closing years of the twentieth century are a period in which the body is of a central importance. Exalted exorbitant prestige, beauty and sports are cultivated with almost religious devotion. Metaphors of the body are taking over our vocabulary. […] These skin drawings throw an everyday relationship into sharp relief: products, and the brand emblems get under our skin and make themselves at home in our subconscious, into which they are insinuated by the suggestive technique of advertising.
Daniele Buetti

Airan Kang is a conceptual and media based contemporary artist from Seoul, Korea. Since the 1990s, Kang has been exploring her “Digital Book Project,” where dust jackets are enshrined in mirrored or clear plastic and then lit up with LED to become neon sculptures. Libraries, journals, poems, words and typography entwine with technology, bringing the internal world of ideas, thoughts and the imagination, into the exterior; carving and creating ‘interspaces’ with them.

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s dramatic life and iconic paintings—which variously feature obsessive scribbling, enigmatic symbols and diagrams, and iconography including skulls, masks, and the artist’s trademark crown—make him one of the most famous artists of the 20th century. The self-taught painter embraced graffiti before committing to a studio practice. He found a mentor and friend in Andy Warhol, who helped the young artist navigate the 1980s New York art world. Across his oeuvre, Basquiat drew on his own Caribbean heritage; a convergence of African American, African, and Aztec cultural histories; classical themes; and pop cultural figures including athletes and musicians. The immediacy and intellectual depth of his paintings won him widespread acclaim both before and after his untimely death at the age of 27.

Richard Prince’s Together series is a process of interaction with his idol Willem de Kooning. The idea for these works came to Prince while he was reading a catalogue of de Kooning’s Women series. He began to sketch over the images in the book, drawing with graphite and oil crayon, adding outlines, collaging and taping silhouettes and textures to the original figures.

Aimed as a form of cultural criticism, Banksy often targets established social and political agendas with his witty illustrations produced with stencils and spray paint in cities across the globe. Active since the 1990s, his satirical street art and subversive epigrams combine dark humour with graffiti executed in a distinctive stenciling technique. His works of political and social commentary have appeared on streets, in galleries and auction houses, interior and exterior walls and bridges throughout the world.

The art world is the biggest joke,” he said. “It’s a rest home of the over privileged, the pretentious, and the weak.
Banksy

Since the 1960s, Ed Ruscha’s work has reflected his ongoing interest in language and the idiosyncrasies of life in LA. He places words and phrases from the colloquial and consumerist vernacular atop photographic images or fields of colour. He often paints and draws with unusual materials such as gunpowder, blood, and Pepto Bismol, drawing attention to the deterioration of language and the pervasive clichés in American culture. Working in diverse media with humor and wit he locates the sublime in landscapes both natural and artificial.

The End evokes a split second of film projection on the big screen. The effect of instantaneity is enhanced by the imperfections and vertical lines in the gray field, which are intended to resemble the tiny scratches, scrapes, and particles of dust that can mar film and projector lenses. The title and subject of the work remind us that the continuum of time is composed of the momentary; a flash of ending differentiates past from present and present from future.

Roy Lichtenstein was one of the most influential and innovative artists of the second half of the twentieth century. Preeminently identified with Pop Art, a movement he helped originate, his first fully achieved paintings were based on imagery from comic strips and advertisements and rendered in a style mimicking the crude printing processes of newspaper reproduction. These paintings reinvigorated the American art scene and altered the history of modern art. As with his most celebrated Pop paintings of the 1960s, Lichtenstein gravitated toward what he would characterize as the “dumbest” or “worst” visual item he could find and then went on to alter or improve it. In the 1960s, commercial art was considered beneath contempt by the art world; in the early 1950s, with the rise of Abstract Expressionism, nineteenth-century American narrative and genre paintings were at the nadir of their reputation among critics and collectors. Paraphrasing, particularly the paraphrasing of despised images, became a paramount feature of Lichtenstein’s art. Well before finding his signature mode of expression in 1961, Lichtenstein called attention to the artifice of conventions and taste that permeated art and society. What others dismissed as trivial fascinated him as classic and idealized—in his words, “a purely American mythological subject matter.”

(Excerpted from Lichtenstein Foundation)

Dean Stockton, better known under his pseudonym D*Face, creates incisive, irreverent paintings, prints, sculptures, and murals that satirize popular culture. His targets range from mainstream consumerism to the American dream. Employing a Pop aesthetic, D*Face references cartoon characters such as Mickey Mouse and celebrities such as Kurt Cobain, draping instantly recognizable icons with signifiers of death, excess, and greed. The artist cites New York’s graffiti and skateboard cultures as formative influences, and his work can evoke the styles of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol.

Friends since the early 1960s, photographer Lee Friedlander and painter Jim Dine formed an early bond when Friedlander gave Dine a photograph he made on a trip to Cincinnati – not re alizing Dine had been raised there. Since then, both artists have established long distinguished careers in photography and in painting, respectively, and here we see their work beautifully paired. While similarities between the work of these two artists may not at first be apparent, they share an eye for nuance and detail. As the combinations of photographs and etchings found in Work from the Same House – a collaborative portfolio created by the artists in 1969 attest, the details are the primary subject of each’s work.

Jim Dine “is an American artist and poet known for his contributions to the formation of both Performance Art and Pop Art. Employing motifs which include Pinocchio, hearts, bathrobes, and tools, Dine produces colorful paintings, photographs, prints, and sculptures Dine became part of a milieu of artists which included Allan Kaprow and Claes Oldenburg, with whom he began to stage performances at sites in the city that later became known as Happenings. By the early 1960s, he had switched his focus towards painting, drawing on his interest in popular imagery and commercial objects. T

Lee Friedlander, meanwhile, is “a seminal American photographer known for his innovative images of city streets. Often featuring candid portraits of people, signs, and reflections of himself in store front windows, Friedlander’s street photography captures the unexpected overlaps of light and content in urban landscapes. ‘I’m not a premeditative photographer,’ he has said. ‘You don’t have to go looking for pictures. The material is generous. You go out and the pictures are staring at you. (Excerpted from Figg Art Museum)

That is Right – $8,000 USD ($10,500 CAD)
Certain – $8,000 USD ($10,500 CAD)
Actual – $8,000 USD ($10,500 CAD)
Positive – $8,000 USD ($10,500 CAD)
Accurate – $8,000 USD ($10,500 CAD)
Correct – $8,000 USD ($10,500 CAD)
Sure – $8,000 USD ($10,500 CAD)
Exact – $8,000 USD ($10,500 CAD)
True – $8,000 USD ($10,500 CAD)
Final – $8,000 USD ($10,500 CAD)

Robert Rauschenberg’s art has always been one of thoughtful inclusion. Working in a wide range of subjects, styles, materials, and techniques, Rauschenberg has been called a forerunner of essentially every postwar movement since Abstract Expressionism. At the time that he began making art in the late 1940s and early 1950s, his belief that “painting relates to both art and life” presented a direct challenge to the prevalent modernist aesthetic.

The celebrated Combines, begun in the mid-1950s, brought real-world images and objects into the realm of abstract painting and countered sanctioned divisions between painting and sculpture. These works established the artist’s ongoing dialogue between mediums, between the handmade and the readymade, and between the gestural brushstroke and the mechanically reproduced image. Rauschenberg’s lifelong commitment to collaboration—with performers, printmakers, engineers, writers, artists, and artisans from around the world—is a further manifestation of his expansive artistic philosophy. Rauschenberg lived and worked in New York City and on Captiva Island, Florida, until his death on May 12, 2008.

(Excerpted from Rauschenberg Foundation)

Working from an archive of both personal and found photos, Canadian artist Andrew Olcott paints his intimate relationships in tandem with lived experiences, markers of contemporary life and portraits of friends and of himself as a young boy. Chronicling his adolescence and personal growth, Olcott invites us to share in an appreciation for his roots and key moments in his life. He renders his source material into abstract paintings by mimicking the halftone, dotted effect of commercial printing. Resonant conversations, appropriated phrases and banal truths told humorously find their way into his text based work, prompting exploration into the perception and the subtleties of language and meaning.

Katherine Bernhardt is a contemporary American artist. Bernhardt’s boundless visual appetite has established her as one of the most energetic painters working today. She first attracted notice in the early 2000s for her paintings of supermodels taken straight from the pages of fashion magazines such as Elle and Vogue. In the decade following, she began making pattern paintings that feature an ever-expanding list of quotidian motifs. Tacos, coffee makers, toilet paper, cigarettes, E.T., Garfield, Darth Vader, and the Pink Panther make unlikely visual combinations within expansive fields of exuberant color. She takes pleasure in variety, and fully investigates each of her obsessions before moving to another. Bernhardt’s trust in the fundamental underpinnings of painting gives her the freedom to depict anything she wants, and the democratizing surfaces of her canvases work without illusion, perspective, logical scale shifts, or atmosphere.

The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules but by people following the rules. It’s people who follow orders that drop bombs and massacre villages.
Banksy

George Condo has a cross-disciplinary practice working with paint, sculptures, drawings, and prints. Condo attended the University of Massachusetts in Lowell, where he studied art history and music theory, he moved to Boston after two years of college and took job in a silkscreen shop and joined a band called The Girls. While in the band, Condo met Jean-Michel Basquiat, which prompted Condo to move to New York to seriously pursue a career as an artist.

Condo’s first public exhibitions were held in East Village galleries between 1981 and 1983. It was also during this time that he worked in Andy Warhol’s factory as an assistant, applying gold dust to Warhol’s Myths series.

Art photography has been around since the early 19th century as a viable way to see behind the eyes and into the mind of an artist. Yet contemporary artist Vik Muniz has managed to repurpose its traditional uses beyond presenting images at face value by treating photographs as source material, building block, and inspiration for more complex works. Verging on mixed media, and with a conceptual spin, Muniz’s art asks us to question our relationship with illusion and perception, going deeper into the familiar to uncover layers of added meaning.

With his recycling and manipulation of imagery, Muniz’s work questions the idea that artistic creativity involves coming up with a completely original idea and champions the idea of expounding upon the existent. Historical artworks, scenes from popular culture, iconic people from our communal consciousness, and cross sections of contemporary, global life highlighting lesser known social issues and marginalized communities are all prey to Muniz’s investigations into how we are affected by, and find meaning within, what we see.

(Excerpt from Art Story)

A MATTER OF INFLUENCE.

About

Contact Us

HOWARD495