LIVERPOOL, UK.- Tate Liverpool presents "Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture," on view through 23 March 2003. Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture is the first exhibition to examine in-depth the relationship between the display, distribution and consumption of commodities and modern and contemporary art. Located on two floors of the gallery, Shopping, a co-production with the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, will be one of the most ambitious and spectacular exhibitions ever staged at Tate Liverpool.
Since the flâneur of the nineteenth-century Parisian arcades, the browsing, selection, purchase and consumption of objects has been recognized as a defining activity of modern urban life. Shopping has long transcended the mere satisfaction of mundane physical necessities and has become an essential ritual of contemporary life through which identities are shaped and transformed. This exhibition investigates shopping as a dominant phenomenon of twentieth-century culture and tracks the dialogue between art and commercial presentation techniques.
The artwork in Shopping ranges from Eugène Atget’s photographs of Paris shop fronts in the 1910s to site-specific installations by contemporary artists. The exhibition includes major installations and environments such as Claes Oldenburg’s Store (1961) and The American Supermarket (1964) in New York (by Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Robert Watts, Tom Wesselmann and others), as well as Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg’s Living with Pop - A Demonstration for Capitalist Realism (1963) in a Dusseldorf furniture store and a classic example of Christo’s covered store fronts from 1969.
Shopping also includes Richard Estes’ photorealistic paintings of shop windows, Jeff Koons’ monumental vacuum-cleaner vitrines and Damien Hirst’s Pharmacy (1992). Guillaume Bijl will construct a contemporary supermarket complete with shelves, products, signage and checkout in the galleries. Contemporary artists will create site-specific installations that promise to transform the gallery spaces, spilling over into the city’s adjoining shopping environment.
