PALM BEACH, FLA.- Acquavella Galleries announced that Painted Pop, a selling exhibition featuring painted works by key figures of the American Pop movement, will travel to the gallery’s location in Palm Beach. The exhibition features important works by artists including Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, Ed Ruscha, Wayne Thiebaud, Andy Warhol, and Tom Wesselmann. Painted Pop will be on view in the Palm Beach gallery from January 4 –February 11, 2024.
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.
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 Four Jackies (1964), four separate canvases come together to form one precarious composition of First Lady Jackie Kennedy. Pulling from found photographs of the cultural icon—either prior to or after the assassination of her husband, President John F. Kennedy—Warhol painted images that not only incorporate the sensationalism of the moment but also manifests a historical record of intense emotionality. Shifting from objects of commodification to celebrity figures, Warhol ascribes similar critical modalities when appropriating imagery of persons into his works, treating the repeated image of Jackie Kennedy as an embodiment of American pop culture rather than a product of it. In this regard, Warhol expunges a painted surface that reflects his painterly hand and his personal interest while also reading into the communal consumption of celebrity. This contrast between individual versus collective and repetition versus singularity continued to interest artists well after Pop Art’s initial popularity.
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 Matisse’s romanticized nudes. The meta-appropriation of art history’s own imagery was of particular interest to Tom Wesselmann (1931-2004). Working with historically entrenched subjects, the nude and the still life, the artist approached Pop Art’s consumptive role in a contrary way compared to his contemporaries, incorporating commercial images as collage to accentuate the realism of mid-century America. Imbuing his works with art historical references, Wesselmann’s Great American Nude series marches alongside the history of the reclining nude, satirizing the coquettish nature of the odalisque trope with the overt eroticism found in his inclusion of a collaged smile sourced from advertising. The duality of Pop Art is represented here in an amalgamation of high and low, deconstructing previous hierarchies of culture.
